The image, noticed initially by a space blogger, has caused a bit of an uproar in the blogosphere about the possibility of intelligent life on Mars, according to the
San Francisco Chronicle.
One well-known blogger, Scott Waring, who maintains the website
UFO Sightings Daily, said the light shined upward from the surface and was flat across the bottom.
"This could indicate there there is intelligent life below the ground and uses light as we do," Waring wrote on his site, the newspaper said.
"This is not a glare from the sun, nor is it an artifact of the photo process," Waring said.
But a spokesman for
NASA's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Fox News.com that the bright light most likely was a reflection off a rock surface or due to a vent hole in the camera itself.
"One possibility is that the light is the glint from a rock surface reflecting the sun," the spokesman, Justin Maki, told
Fox News.
""We think it's either a vent-hole light leak or a glinty rock," Maki said.
The photo was taken last week, probably by the Curiosity rover, which is exploring the Kimberley, an outcropping of rocks inside the Gale Crater, where the rover landed in 2012.
The picture was posted to the internet by the JPL.
The JPL also monitors the activites of NASA's other active Mars rover, Opportunity, which landed in 2004.
Opportunity's twin, Spirit, stopped communicating in 2010.
NASA has yet to issue an official statement about the light controversy.
The Kimberley location, where four different types of rock intersect on the Martian surface, was named for a region in western
Australia.
It was chosen to further study the growing likelihood that life formerly existed on Mars, FoxNews said.
