Garbage is found on the Earth in the most unusual places, it is even at the bottom of the Mariana Trench at a depth of 11 km. Garbage was found even on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently searching for extraterrestrial life in the delta of a dried-up river, photographed a fragment from a spacecraft stuck in a rock. The fragment is part of the thermal protection of the Perseverance descent module body, which was heated to extreme temperatures when entering the Martian atmosphere.
“The NASA team has discovered something unexpected. When approaching the photo, it turned out that this is a piece of a heat shield that broke off from the body during landing in 2021,” the space agency commented.
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
The question arises how the fragments, similar to foil, got into the area of the Martian Jezero crater, which is about two kilometers from the place where the landing gear with a rocket engine crashed in the Martian desert. NASA believes that it was brought here by the wind.
Perseverance Landing
The Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars in February 2021. As it descended, the descent module holding the rover dropped various tools and objects, including a heat shield, a braking parachute and a “sky crane” with a rocket engine, which gently lowered the rover to the surface. Perseverance has previously found a dropped parachute, so it’s not surprising that the rover is now finding other debris that littered the Red Planet a bit.
Earlier, a passenger travels on board Perseverance for four months in a row.
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