Although no one has yet set foot on Mars, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has found surprising but very human evidence of our visits to the red planet: debris.
The thermal blanket covering Mars. Image Credits NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU.
Where people go, garbage follows. But it looks like it could even overtake us! NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover team announced on Twitter on Wednesday that the space robot had encountered man-made debris on the Red Planet.
Although the discovery goes a long way in demonstrating the effect we can have on the world around us, even in places we ourselves have not yet reached, it is quite a fun discovery. Perseverance was sent to Mars to look for evidence of life, and today he did – find evidence of the life that sent him there.
Where no one has thrown garbage before
“My team noticed something unexpected: this is a piece of thermal blanket that they believe may have come from the descent stage, the rocket jet pack that took me down on the day of landing in 2021,” the rover’s Twitter account said.
The team said they were “surprised” when the rover encountered the piece of thermal blanket where he made it, as the site is about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) from where the rover landed on Mars. Thermal blankets are insulating coatings used to protect crafts during downhill skiing and resemble padded metal foil. The permanence was wrapped in this material before being loaded into the rocket that carried it to Mars.
It is not yet clear whether the piece broke off during the descent and landed in this place, or was blown here from the landing site by Martian winds.
This piece of thermal blanket joins the only other known artificial garbage on Mars: the equipment left after the Perseverance landing, photographed by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter in April.
As ridiculous as this news is, however, it points to a very real and growing problem. As we push further into space, we will invariably throw waste. It is already known that debris such as boots, parachutes and even entire vehicles have been abandoned by past missions. Closer to Earth, the Department of Defense’s global space surveillance network is currently tracking more than 27,000 pieces of “space debris” orbiting our planet, according to NASA. If this accumulation continues, we may very well remain trapped on Earth.
“Many more debris – too small to be traced, but large enough to threaten human spaceflight and robotic missions – exist in the Earth’s outer space environment,” explains NASA. “Because both the wreckage and the spacecraft are moving at extremely high speeds (approximately 15,700 miles per hour in low Earth orbit), hitting even a tiny piece of orbital debris with a spacecraft can create major problems.
The International Space Station is already at risk from these space debris, but there are almost no regulations protecting space from debris. As more and more people make their way farther into space, such issues will have to be addressed, one way or another.
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