Nasa keeps finding its own trash on Mars
Nasa’s Perseverance rover recently ran into a surprise — a piece of shiny foil stuck to a rock on the Red Planet.
As Nasa tweeted from an account dedicated to the Perseverance rover, the team behind the rover mission thinks it’s likely a piece of a thermal blanket from the descent stage rocket that landed Perseverance on the Martian surface in 2021. But they don’t really know how it got to where it is now, a whopping two miles from where the rover landed.
That shiny bit of foil is part of a thermal blanket – a material used to control temperatures. It’s a surprise finding this here: My descent stage crashed about 2 km away. Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind? pic.twitter.com/uVx3VdYfi8
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) June 15, 2022
It’s not the first time Nasa has come across the detritus of its own operations on Mars. In April, the Ingenuity helicopter that arrived on Mars with Perseverance came across the descent stage and landing gear that brought them both to the surface of the Red Planet. It’s the likely source of the piece of thermal blanket Perseverance just came across.
We spy with our little eyes…rover landing gear!
During the #MarsHelicopter’s 26th flight, it took photos of the entry, descent, & landing gear @NASAPersevere needed to safely land on Mars. You can see the protective backshell & massive dusty parachute. https://t.co/1r5uoc5FyM pic.twitter.com/ePlEASIrr0— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 27, 2022
All of the missions that have reached the surface of Mars have left material on the surface, including Nasa’s now defunct Opportunity and Spirit rovers, and the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander that crashed on Mars in 2016. Nasa’s sample return mission, scheduled to bring samples of Martian soil back to Earth in the early 2030s, is the only mission currently scheduled to bring anything back from the Martian surface.
Nasa goes to great lengths to ensure its hardware is sterilized before flying to Mars to prevent biological contamination by Earth microbes, but spent piece of hardware are, for the time being, often necessary for getting spacecraft to the surface of other worlds.