Cosmic Rays
It turns out that both cosmic rays and glinting rocks are pretty common on Mars. They've been spotted before. Such rocks have been seen in images sent by several of NASA's Mars rovers, and cosmic rays appear in images that Curiosity sends to Earth each week.
Maki said that one percent of those hundreds of weekly images might include cosmic ray-induced bright spots. But the junked-up pixels normally don't cause much of a stir.
"You'll see cosmic rays every two or three days. Certainly at least once a week," Maki said. "The reason we see so many is because Mars's atmosphere is thinner: It doesn't block as much cosmic radiation as Earth's does."
Cosmic rays are charged particles that fly through the universe in every direction all the time. Every so often they'll collide with something like a camera. One sign of a cosmic ray hit, Maki said, is the appearance of the ray in images taken by one of Curiosity's eyes but not the other.
Glinting rocks, on the other hand, could easily reflect Martian sunlight. But it's not clear why the glimmer would appear just in the right-eye images, Maki said. He notes that one of the left-eye images is obscured, and he says it's not impossible for a glimmer to show up on only one side.
"I'd probably lean toward cosmic rays," Maki said. "But I'd like to keep an open mind."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...y-lights-pictures-photos-aliens-space-science
