On Mars, NASA's Curiosity rover captured a beautiful, fragile creation that appears to be a branching piece of ocean coral. It's not coral, but it's interesting to consider how we see similar Earth objects on Mars in strange patterns.

The tiny Martian sculpture elicits poetic analogies. It resembles the tendrils of an anemone in a tide pool or a water droplet captured at the moment of bursting against a surface.

CNET reported that Kevin Gill, a NASA image processor, drew my notice to the lovely Curiosity photographs on Friday with a tweet that described the creation as a "Martian flower."

The image comes from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument, which NASA describes as "the rover's version of the magnifying hand lens that geologists usually carry with them into the field." So the formation in the image is quite small.

A helpful visual reference was tweeted by Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist for Curiosity, that compares the object to a US penny to offer an approximate sense of scale.

The image "shows microscopic, tiny delicate structures that created by mineral precipitating from water," according to Fraeman.

Since 2012, Curiosity has been based in the Gale Crater on Mars. It's making its way up Mount Sharp, the crater's centre summit, taking selfies and learning about Mars' geology, history, and atmosphere as it goes.