The Perseverance rover spotted a tangle of noodles. NASA believes it's a piece of the rover's own trash.
The space agency believes that the debris is a piece of shredded Dacron net from the entry, descent, and landing gear.
Dacron is used in thermal blankets to regulate equipment temperature. According to the Perseverance team, the ball of net was shredded and tangled, suggesting that it was hit by strong forces.
There are concerns about leaving debris on the surface of the planet. The Perseverance team members are looking at images of the debris to see if the material may be a potential source for the sample tubes.
It took seven months for Perseverance to land on Mars after being tasked with finding signs of ancient life. The entry, descent, and landing hardware flew off when the rover landed on the red planet.
In space missions, discarded debris is common, according to a NASA scientist.
NASA has shared images of the debris before. In April, the 4-pound Ingenuity chopper, the first aircraft to take flight on another world, located and captured photos of the wreck of a dust-covered, orange-and-white parachute and a backshell. The pictures were taken on the one-year anniversary of Ingenuity's first trip to the Red Planet.
Researchers hope to study the pieces of hardware to plan future space missions.
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 reinforce that our systems worked, or if they give us a single dataset of engineering information that we can use. If not, the pictures are still amazing.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
