The Perseverance Mars rover from NASA has obtained an unusual photograph of a gleaming piece of foil attached to a rock on Mars. The foil is part of a thermal blanket that could have originated from the rocket’s descent stage, which landed the rover and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter on Mars.
The descent stage, on the other hand, collapsed around 2 kilometres away. As a result, scientists aren’t sure if the object landed there during the fall or was blown there by Martian winds.
On June 15, the Perseverance rover team tweeted, “My team has uncovered something unexpected: It’s a piece of a thermal blanket that they suspect may have originated from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day back in 2021,” A sheet of foil with dots across it is clearly visible in the image taken by the rover’s left Mastcam-Z camera on June 13.
The fragment is undoubtedly from a thermal blanket, according to Andrew Good, a NASA JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) official. However, according to Good, “it’s unclear which area of the spacecraft it came from. These blankets aid in temperature regulation throughout the critical phase of entry, descent, and landing, popularly known as the “seven minutes of horror.”
“Think of them as spacecraft dressmakers,” the rover’s social media team tweeted about the folks who make these blankets. They use sewing machines and other instruments to put these one-of-a-kind materials together.“
The rover is now studying an ancient river delta region within Mars’ Jezero Crater in the hopes of discovering evidence of ancient microbial life. As a result, the region with a history of water presence is a suitable place to look into and gather rock samples. NASA intends to return these samples to Earth for further investigation. The US space agency has joined forces with the European Space Agency to form a 16-member Mars Sample Return Campaign Science group, which will develop the project’s roadmap.
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