NASA’s Mars rover has made a surprise discovery on the red planet, though it's not quite the evidence of ancient life that scientists are hoping to find there.
NASA’s Mars rover recently made a surprise discovery on the distant planet, though sadly it’a not quite the evidence of ancient microbial life that scientists are hoping to find there.Specifically, the object, pictured below, appears to be a piece of a thermal blanket that was attached to Perseverance’s descent stage. The descent stage was part of the spacecraft that delivered Perseverance to the martian surface last year before performing a controlled crash landing well clear of the rover.
In a series of messages posted on Perseverance’s Twitter account this week, the rover’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California suggested it may have drifted there during the landing phase, or been blown to its new location by martian winds. There’s certainly no suggestion that hitherto undiscovered martians may have had something to do with it.
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. pic.twitter.com/O4rIaEABLu Another post says thermal blankets protect a spacecraft’s components by regulating temperatures, adding: “It’s a surprise finding this here: My descent stage crashed about 2 km away.
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