Perseverance Takes A Photograph Of Its Own Wreckage

Dried plants rolling in desolate deserts is one of the common clichés in American movies. The red planet Mars, technically a huge desert, also has stray structures on its surface, but these are not plants. They don’t even belong to Mars, they are things we sent from Earth.

Many protective fragments ejected by NASA’s Perseverance rover during its entry into the Martian atmosphere, landing and touchdown remain on the planet’s surface. It is necessary to see these remains in the latest images taken by the vehicle.

We polluted Mars from the first minute

When you send a vehicle to another planet, you may have to mess up a bit. Because while vehicles are moving at a very high speed, they need various equipment to slow down and land safely. Perseverance had to reduce its speed from 20 thousand kilometers per hour to zero during its descent on February 18, 2021. Moreover, all this happened in just 7 minutes.

When the rover reached its target, parts such as the parachute, protection shell, heat shell and air winch were thrown to a safe distance so as not to damage the vehicle. Although traces of the remains were found in the images taken from equipment such as the vehicle’s Mastcam-Z panoramic view camera before, there was no clear image.

Perseverance was able to view some of the remaining equipment from the landing in its recent inspections. One of them belonged to one of the protective layers, while the other was seen to be a knot-like ball of thread that was thought to be left from the thermal net called Dacron. It is remarkable that this swarm has not yet flown away, but this is quite normal when we consider how thin the atmosphere of the planet is.

The fact that these structures, which are located a few kilometers away from the vehicle, are gathered in the same place is explained by the collection of ruined structures there as a result of natural movements. These images were captured by Ingenuity, the vehicle’s helicopter companion.