Mars rover rumbles by crashed artifacts in the Martian desert

[Buster's Uncle]

Mars rover rumbles by crashed artifacts in the Martian desert
Mark Kaufman - 5h ago
Mashable


NASA's Perseverance rover is on a mission to sleuth out past evidence of life on Mars. Along the way, it found evidence of Earthlings.



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Mars rover rumbles by crashed artifacts in the Martian desert


This week, the space agency posted an image of two objects the rover passed while traversing the Martian desert: a discarded parachute and a metal capsule. Both played vital roles in helping the car-sized exploration rover land safely on Mars.

"Definitely wouldn’t be where I am without them!" NASA tweeted from the Perseverance rover's Twitter account.

You can spot the objects in the middle of the image. On left is the collapsed orange and white parachute; on right is a conspicuous part of the shell that housed the rover as it plunged through Mars' atmosphere in February 2021.

Landing the 2,260-pound, $2.7 billion rover on Mars was an impressive feat, dubbed the "seven minutes of terror." The plummeting spacecraft, traveling at some 1,000 mph, deployed a supersonic parachute to slow down. It ditched its heavy heat shield. Before choosing a safe landing spot (free of boulders, pits, or dangerous rocks), it abandoned the parachute; then a rocket-powered apparatus fired up and hovered in the air while carefully lowering the rover down to the ground. Everything must work swimmingly — and it did.

The rover is now on its way to a dried-up delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, a place planetary scientists believe once hosted a lake.

"This delta is one of the best locations on Mars for the rover to look for signs of past microscopic life," NASA said.