Earlier this month, scientists announced that they were mystified by the presence of a rock that suddenly appeared in front of the Opportunity rover on the surface of Mars. Twelve days earlier, Opportunity had been in the exact same spot and the rock wasn't there.

"We're looking at the legacy of Opportunity's first decade this week, but there's more good stuff ahead," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, the mission's principal investigator, in a NASA statement. "We are examining a rock right in front of the rover that is unlike anything we've seen before. Mars keeps surprising us, just like in the very first week of the mission."

While most NASA scientists chalked it up to a curiosity and nothing more, one California man has decided that this explanation was not enough. On Monday, Rhawn Joseph, a self-described “astrobiologist” filed a writ of mandamus against NASA. In his 11-page brief, he accused NASA of a “dereliction of duty,” and wants to compel the agency to take “100 high-resolution photographs” of the rock in question.

Neither Squyres nor NASA immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

UPDATE Thursday 10:15am CT: NASA spokesperson Bob Jacobs did respond to Ars late Wednesday night, saying:

This is an ongoing legal matter and we are limited in what we can discuss about the filing. However, NASA has been publicly sharing our ongoing research into the rock dubbed “Pinnacle Island" since we originally released the images from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity earlier this month. The rock, which NASA is studying to better understand its chemical composition, also was widely discussed during a Jan. 22 NASA Television news conference. As we do with all our scientific research missions, NASA will continue to discuss any new data regarding the rock and other images and information as new data becomes available.

“An explanation which is preposterous, absurd, and ridiculous”

Joseph further argues that he “immediately recognized” the rock for what NASA officials apparently could not: a “mushroom-like fungus, a composite organism consisting of colonies of lichen and cyanobacteria, and which on Earth is known as Apothecium.”

He writes in the petition:

Petitioner made these discoveries whereas the rover team did not, simply because NASA’s rover team inexplicably failed to perform the basic demands of science, which is “re-search,” look again. . . . The refusal to take close up photos from various angles, the refusal to take microscopic images of the specimen, the refusal to release high resolution photos, is inexplicable, recklessly negligent, and bizarre. Any intelligence adult, adolescent, child, chimpanzee, monkey, dog or rodent with even a modicum of curiosity, would approach, investigate and closely examine a bowl-shaped structure which appears just a few feet in front of them when 12 days earlier they hadn’t noticed it. . . . Yet NASA insists the structure is a rock or a meteor, an explanation which is perposterous, absurd and ridiculous. The description of this structure as a rock or meteor, coupled with the inexplicable failure to take close-up and microscopic photos and refusal to make high resolution photos available, raises the specter of a purposeful attempt to deceive the public and scientific community so that administrators at NASA can continue gutting planetary exploration programs and diverting funds to private corporate interests without opposition. The only other explanation is that NASA’s rover team is outrageously negligent, obscenely incompetent, shockingly ignorant about basic biology, and prone to magical thinking.

This isn’t the first time that Rhawn Joseph has come up with some... interesting theories. In 2012, Joseph sued NASA for what he dubbed a “terrorist campaign of lies, deceit, fraud, defamation, libel, and slander, to discredit all discoveries which demonstrate the existence of extraterrestrial microbial and other forms of extraterrestrial life.”

He also has a pending lawsuit against Amazon for the company's refusal to “directly sell books authored or published by the Plaintiff.” (A search on Amazon for Rhawn Joseph turns up a handful of books, which all appear to be self-published titles.) A prior suit against Amazon in 2001 was also dismissed.

The earlier lawsuit against NASA appears to have been dismissed or withdrawn.