OK so this is the kind of story I would send to the group chat with no context and three exclamation points. NASA has discovered a series of mysterious holes punched into the surface of Mars, and per the Daily Mail's report, researchers spotted the strange structures while reviewing images from the Curiosity rover... and scientists currently have no idea what created them. Like, actually no idea, not even a cautious maybe. The holes are just there, on Mars, being mysterious, and the people who landed a robot on that planet cannot tell you why.

I want to sit with that for a second. This is a mission with some of the smartest planetary scientists alive, a rover that has spent years trundling around the red planet sending back pictures, and the official status of these holes is a giant question mark. I don't see that as a failure at all, it's honestly my favorite part of science, the part where the universe hands you something and shrugs.

Now, the discovery does invite an obvious and very fun question: what could they be? And I'm going to resist answering that, because the honest answer is that nobody knows yet, and I'm not going to invent theories and dress them up as NASA's. What we have is holes. In rock. On Mars. Spotted by Curiosity. Unexplained. Sometimes that's the whole story and the whole story is already great.

There's one general reason holes on Mars get scientists excited, beyond the sheer coolness of it (which, let's be real, is enormous). Underground spaces on Mars are relatively protected from the harsh conditions on the surface, which is why NASA has long been interested in caves and subsurface features as places to look for signs of past microbial life and, someday, potential shelter for human explorers. Whether these particular holes connect to anything underground is exactly the kind of thing scientists will have to figure out, and I am going to be extremely annoying about following it.

Because that's the deal with a mystery like this. Right now the information is thin on purpose, thin because that's genuinely all anyone has. The rover took the pictures. Researchers found the holes. Nobody can explain them yet. Everything from here is waiting: more analysis, more images, more arguments among very smart people, and eventually, hopefully, an answer.

And when that answer comes, I'll be right here, probably yelling about it, definitely thrilled. Joy is worth documenting, and so is a mystery on another planet. Mars punched some holes in itself and won't tell us why, and I think that's wonderful.