NASA’s rover Curiosity discovers Australia on Mars, sort of

In documenting a new region of Mars, NASA's rover Curiosity came across a rock that looks very much like Australia. Curiosity's navigating camera beamed the image back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles earlier today, and the space agency quickly uploaded it to Curiosity's raw image library, available for online visitors to peruse. NASA's image caption makes no mention of the Land Down Under, but as Discovery News reports, Twitter user @CoUdErMaNn quickly spotted the resemblance. Very strange rock formation took #Nasa @MarsCuriosity today in Mars> pic.twitter.com/lmml8r17uL— CoUdErMaNn (@CoUdErMaNn) April 7, 2014 Making the discovery all the more fascinating -- and coincidental -- is the fact that, last week, Curiosity began surveying a region of Mars known as "Kimberley," named for a region of Western Australia. "This is the spot on the map we've been headed for, on a little rise that gives us a great view for context imaging of the outcrops at the Kimberley," Melissa Rice, a scientists at the California Institute of Technology, said in a NASA press release. With Curiosity's arrival in the Kimberley region, the rover has now traveled some 3.8 miles since its Martian landing in August of 2012.