Without ever landing a person on the surface of the Red Planet, humanity has found a way to pollute it. On Wednesday, NASA reported that its rover Perseverance had seen “something unexpected” मानवीhuman waste on Mars. A tweet shared by the rover team showed a small, silver piece of foil attached to two rocks in the Jezero crater, which Perseverance has been searching for more than a year for ancient signs of life and other biosignatures.
“It’s amazing to find here: my landing stage crashed about 2km away,” the team wrote in a stubborn voice. “Did the piece land here or was it blown away by the wind?” NASA identified the debris as a piece of thermal blanket, a piece of rover landing gear used to control the temperature during the touch-down phase of a nail bite, referred to by the agency as “seven minutes of panic”.
Persistence touched the surface of the planet in February 2021, launching NASA’s ninth mission to Mars. It was not immediately clear on Wednesday whether any fines would be levied on the little robot for littering.