This snapshot was part of the latest set of photos transmitted by the Perseverance Rover as it continues its long, solitary journey across the Martian surface.
What stands out immediately is the quality of the picture, which looks strikingly similar to a landscape photo you might take during a hike somewhere on Earth.
But while the technology behind the rover is impressive, people on social media took a very different message from the photo as it made its way across millions of miles.
This was because the crystal-clear shot highlighted how empty and lifeless the Martian landscape is when compared with the colorful, full-of-life environments we enjoy here on Earth.
On Reddit, one user summed it up by saying: “Doesn’t look promising. Better take care of this place instead.”
A second person chimed in with: “Boring. Lame. The sky isn’t even blue. One star.”
Another user kept it simple and said: “Looks depressing.”
“It’s just sand, rocks and the occasional bit of dry ice,” they wrote. “There’s no streams, no rain, no puddles or anything that we’d recognise as part of a living planet.”
Even NASA seemed to echo that sentiment, describing Mars on its website by noting: “Mars is no place for the faint-hearted. It’s dry, rocky, and bitter cold.”
It’s far from the first time that space exploration has made people think about how fragile our home really is.
Astronomer Carl Sagan famously reflected on this in relation to the “Pale Blue Dot” photo taken by the Voyager probe, describing Earth as “dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
