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Spirit discovers life on Mars

Panoramic snap reveals mystery 'figure'

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A Chinese website has reportedly posted the first sighting of Martian life in the form of a mysterious figure caught on camera by the Spirit rover:

A closer look at the mystery Martian figure

According to the Mail on Sunday, the sighting came after alien hunters spent "years" scouring NASA images for evidence of little green men before unearthing this example.

In fact, the Red Planet's first confirmed inhabitant features in this panorama snapped by Spirit back in November last year. We've marked the approximate position of the extraterrestrial with an arrow:

The panoramic view of the Martian surface. Image: NASA

A close-up of the mystery figureAnd before you all going running off to the NASA website to get the highest-res snap possible, here's our Martian as seen in the biggest file we could find - the 133 meg tiff.

Well, the jury's out on this one. NASA has the above false colour panorama available here, or you might try the slightly less colourful version here, or stereo representation here. Happy hunting. ®

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