Is it tumbleweed? A piece of fishing line? Spaghetti?
A tangled object discovered by
NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has intrigued
space watchers, leaving some musing tongue-in-cheek about the quality of
Italian dining on the Red Planet.
اضافة اعلان
But the most plausible explanation is more prosaic: it's likely remnants of
a component used to lower the robotic explorer to the Martian surface in
February 2021.
"We have been discussing where it's from, but there's been speculation
that it's a piece of cord from the parachute or from the landing system that
lowers the rover to the ground," a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory told AFP.
"Note that we don't have confirmation that it's one or the other,"
he added.
The bundle of debris was first spotted July 12 by the rover's front left
hazard avoidance camera -- but when Perseverance returned to the same spot four
days later, it was gone.
It was probably carried away by wind, like a piece of a thermal blanket that
might have come from the rocket-powered landing system, which was spotted last
month.
The accumulating trash left behind by Perseverance is considered a small
price to pay for the rover's noble scientific goals of searching for biosignatures
of ancient microbial life forms.
And these items may one day become valuable artifacts for future Mars
colonists.
"In a hundred years or so Martians will be eagerly collecting up all
this stuff and either putting it on display in museums or making it into
'historical jewelry,'" tweeted amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson.
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