Is it Tumbleweed? A piece of fishing line? Spaghetti?
A tangled object discovered by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has intrigued space observers and left some tongue-in-cheek thoughts about the quality of Italian cuisine on the Red Planet.
But the most plausible explanation is more prosaic: they are likely remnants of a component that was used to lower the robotic explorer to the surface of Mars in February 2021.
“We debated where it came from, but speculation was that it was a piece of string from the parachute or landing system that lowers the rover to the ground,” a spokesman for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
“Note that we have no confirmation that it is one way or the other,” he added.
The wreckage was first spotted by the rover’s front left hazard avoidance camera on July 12 – but by the time Perseverance returned to the same spot four days later, it was gone.
It was likely carried away by the wind, like a piece of thermal blanket that may have come from the rocket-powered landing system discovered last month.
The piling garbage left behind by Perseverance is seen as a small price to pay for the rover’s noble scientific goals of searching for biosignatures of ancient microbial life-forms.
And these items could one day become valuable artifacts for future Martian colonists.
“In about a hundred years, Martians will be collecting all these things eagerly and either displaying them in museums or turning them into ‘historic ornaments,'” tweeted amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson.
#NASA #Mars #rover #discovers #mysterious #object
