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Silver foil found on Mars is litter from rover's landing
The Guardian
|June 17, 2022
Nasa's Perseverance rover typically beams back evocative images of bleak dusty landscapes, red-hued sandstorms and Martian rock samples. So its operators were surprised to receive an image on Monday of a shiny silver object resembling a discarded crisp packet wedged between two rocks.
The object, the Nasa team concluded, is a piece of debris discarded by the robotic craft during its touchdown in February 2021.
"My team has spotted something unexpected: It's a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day back in 2021," the Perseverance Twitter account reported.
"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 2km away. Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind?"
This story is from the June 17, 2022 edition of The Guardian.
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