Since landing on Mars, the Perseverance rover has been looking for signs of life in the crater. There is garbage on the red planet.
The Perseverance team spotted a piece of the thermal blanket used to protect the rover from the extreme temperatures it experienced during landing.
The team wrote that it was a surprise that the robot's descent happened just over a mile away. Was this piece blown here by the wind after that?
There are other pieces of litter on Mars. The landing gear that helped the Perseverance rover get to Mars was captured by the Ingenuity helicopter.
Ian Clark, a former Perseverance systems engineer who now leads the effort to haul Martian samples back to Earth, said in a statement that Perseverance had the best documented Mars landing of all time.
It will be amazing if they either reinforce that our systems worked as we think they worked or provide a single dataset of engineering information that we can use for Mars Sample Return planning. The pictures are still amazing.
The main goal of Perseverance is to find signs of ancient life near its landing site.
The space agencies are concerned about space junk.
Fragments of missions left behind in space, like the boots, shovels, and entire vehicles the Apollo missions left on the moon, can ruin otherwise pristine planetary bodies.
Leaving Earth for space exploration is becoming more dangerous due to the increasing number of satellites and space junk. The International Space Station can be at risk from all that space junk.
—NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) June 15, 2022
There aren't much restrictions on space from pollution. The Outer Space Treaty, which was hammered out in 1967, has not changed much since. The treaty's gaps stick out as Mars becomes a junkyard.
At an American Natural History Museum event last month, Aparna Venkatesan, an astronomy professor at the University of San Francisco, said that protecting the space environment will require defining it as a common heritage of human civilization.
She wanted to know if space was viewed as our shared ancestry. How do you honor it?
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