'Spiders on Mars' fully awakened on Earth for 1st time — and scientists are shrieking with joy

NASA scientists on Earth have recreated the creepy black "spiders" that litter the surface of Mars. The breakthrough left the researchers "shrieking" with joy and could help uncover further secrets about the Mysterious structures.

"Spiders on Mars" is the name given to a geological feature, known as araneiform terrain, that is visible in multiple locations on the Red Planet. In these places, hundreds of dark crack-like structures appear on the planet's surface, each with potentially hundreds of individual lines, or "legs." When viewed from above, these tightly grouped deformations, which can be more than 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) wide, look like a hoard of spiders scurrying across the Martian landscape.

Mars orbiters first spotted the spiders in 2003, and the features have continually popped up in satellite images ever since. At first, these stationary arachnids were a complete mystery, but scientists eventually determined that the spiders form when carbon dioxide (CO2) ice on the planet's surface suddenly sublimates — or turns into gas without first melting into liquid.

In a new study, published Sept. 11 in The Planetary Science Journal, researchers mimicked this process on a smaller scale using a specialized laboratory chamber to create a near-perfect miniature version of the spiders.

For the study's lead author Lauren Mc Keown — a planetary geomorphologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, who has been working on recreating these spiders for five years — the moment of finally birthing the Martian critters was almost too much to handle.

"It was late on a Friday evening [when the experiment succeeded] and the lab manager burst in after hearing me shrieking," Mc Keown said in a statement. "She thought there had been an accident."

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