You've seen a fish, a cannonball and even Jabba the Hutt on Mars. But have you seen the star of a hit 1980s video arcade game? NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has.Â
NASA and the University of Arizona's HiRise team, the group responsible for working with the orbiter's nifty camera, shared a view of an unusual crater on the Red Planet and it sure looks a lot like Pac-Man in full pellet-gobbling mode. Â
Waka, waka, waka.
What we're seeing here is an impact crater with a crescent-shaped barchan sand dune nestled inside. The MRO snapped the image in mid-March and NASA highlighted it this week.Â
Barchan dunes are common on Mars, as seen in this MRO image of a field of wormy-looking formations. But this particular crater-and-dune combination of landscape features is out of the ordinary.Â
NASA's HiRise team pointed out the likeness to Pac-Man and says it is "a rare configuration, and over the next few tens of thousands of years the sand will be blown out of the crater." Pac-Man will be a super-duper-retro game by then.