Did the SOHO Space Probe Spot a UFO?

So, this last week someone spotted an anomaly in the photograph shown above from a NASA solar observatory. The Daily Mail reports:

SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.

SOHO was launched on December 2, 1995.

The twelve instruments on board SOHO communicate with large radio dishes around the world which form NASA's Deep Space Network are used for data downlink and commanding.

‘The video shows what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end.

'An enlargement of the object makes the enormously large UFO look like a ship straight out of a Hollywood movie.'

However, engineers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory say that the image was caused by cosmic rays striking the camera:

According to Nathan Rich, lead ground systems engineer in the NRL's solar physics branch, the "spaceship" is merely a collection of streaks left by cosmic rays, charged particles from space, which whizzed through the camera's sensor, or CCD, as the image was taken.

"The streaks in question are consistent with energetic particle (proton) impacts on the CCD, something which is apparent in just about every image," Rich told Life's Little Mysteries.

"Notably," he added, "these artifacts do not persist from image to image," — proving they are momentary blips in the camera sensor rather than an actual object in the field of view. Some images taken by the Lasco 2 camera are swarming with artifacts, caused by particles zipping across the CCD in every direction.

As a cosmic ray passes through a camera's image sensor, it deposits a large amount of its electric charge in the pixels that it penetrates. If the particle passes through at a shallow angle to the plane of the camera, it affects several pixels along its path. The result is a bright streak on the image.

In the image in question, a burst of cosmic rays happen to hit the camera lens at just the right angles to create the form of a hinged spaceship. The "boom arm," angled at a slant across the rows and columns of pixels, was formed by a cosmic ray streaking through the camera sensor diagonally and at a shallow angle, depositing charge in several pixels along a diagonal line.

Read the stories, look at the pictures, and see what you think.