Star Wars fans amazed after finding ‘lightsaber on Mars’
Science fiction fans following the development of NASA's latest mission to Mars are pretty sure the space agency have been taking cues from Star Wars when it comes to the design of their gadgets.
Pictures released by NASA from their Perseverance Mars rover have shown what looks suspiciously like a lightsaber lying on the red ground of that other planet.
Obviously, it can't be a lightsaber as those aren't actually real and NASA wouldn't sent a mission to Mars just to deposit a cache of the weapons onto the planet's surface.
However, the more you look the more it just looks like a lightsaber, that elegant weapon of a more civilised age which became the iconic tool of Jedi Knights and Sith Lords.
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Either someone at NASA has never seen Star Wars and accidentally made something that just looks like a lightsaber, or far more likely is that a bunch of sci-fi fans work for them and have relished the chance to put a bit of their favourite franchise into their job.
Star Wars fans who spotted the item immediately piled in to make their references, with one joking that 'someone dropped their lightsaber' and others joining in to say that it'll be a nice surprise for people to discover '150 years from now when we forgot about this'.
As for what it actually is, NASA say the object is a titanium tube containing a rock sample which the rover has deposited on the surface of Mars.
In total, 10 tubes will be laid onto the surface of the red planet by the rover, with them stashed as a backup in case the other samples already collected by the robot fail to make it back to Earth.
As for those hoping to wield a real lightsaber one day (and presumably not slice off your own arms spinning it around making whoosh noises), you might just be in luck when it comes to achieving your wildest hopes and dreams.
People have previously developed a weapon called the 'protosaber', which looks and acts like a lightsaber but requires you to lug around a very chunky battery pack to keep it powered up.
Earlier this year, YouTuber Alex Burkan won a Guinness World Record for creating the world's first functional retracting lightsaber.
It can produce a plasma blade a metre long which reaches temperatures of up to 2,800C and can slice through steel.
Sadly, we haven't quite cracked making a lightsaber which can stay on long enough to have a big dramatic fight scene right out of Star Wars as it only works for 30 seconds on full power.
Meanwhile, Burkan has set his sights on creating a working Iron Man suit next, so figuring out how to make a working sustainable lightsaber could be a job for someone else.
Perhaps it could be you?
Joe Harker