These Spidery 'Veins' On Mars Are Just Plain Weird (Photo)

Nobody knows yet whether or not Mars has ever hosted life, but the Red Planet itself looks strangely alive in a newly released NASA photo.

Slender, branching troughs snake across a pinkish, pitted swathe of the southern hemisphere of Mars in the image, creating an impression (at least to this observer) of blood vessels forking through flesh

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The photo was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on Feb. 4 2009, but the agency featured it online on Monday (Jan. 11). You can see more awesome Mars photos by MRO here.

The complex terrain shown in the image was likely shaped by the sublimation (transition from solid phase to gas) of the seasonal carbon-dioxide ice cap near Mars' south pole, NASA officials said.

"The troughs are believed to be formed by gas flowing beneath the seasonal ice to openings where the gas escapes, carrying along dust from the surface below," NASA officials wrote in a description of the photo Monday. "The dust falls to the surface of the ice in fan-shaped deposits."

The HiRISE image depicts an area 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) wide that lies nearly 82 degrees south of the Martian equator. The photo was captured during springtime in the Red Planet's southern reaches.