Satellite photo shows the garbage Perseverance put on Mars
Mar 2, 2021
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover has been all over the news ever since its successful landing on the Martian surface. The rover’s landing didn’t only leave the viewers in tears in awe, but it also left some garbage on Mars. In this satellite image, you can see the rover and its landing components scattered across the landing site.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter took the photo with its CaSSIS camera on 23 February. Perseverance’s landing components are seen as dark or bright pixels in the image showing the Jezero crater. You can see the Perseverance rover in the mid-lower part of the image. On its far left, there’s a parachute and a back shell, and the descent stage is between them and the rover. On the far right of the image, there’s the heat shield.
If you’re having trouble seeing the rover and its landing components, ESA published a color-enhanced and labeled image to make it easier for you. The colors in this image have been adjusted to resemble Mars’ color as we would see it with our eyes:
That space missions generate garbage is not exactly news. According to National History Museum, there’s nothing to worry about just yet, as space junk still doesn’t pose a huge risk to space explorations. But I still can’t help but wonder – what will happen where there’s too much space junk out there? It sure increases with new satellites being launched, as well as new space missions. Maybe one day when people build colonies on Mars, the garbage will already be there to make them feel at home.
[via Gizmodo]
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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34 responses to “Satellite photo shows the garbage Perseverance put on Mars”
Doesn’t seem like a very inhabitable place. Shouldn’t we be spending the time and money on trying to reverse the effects of climate change here on earth?
Chris the amount of money spent on these programs is miniscule compared to say… oh I don’t know the arms industry. Yet no one complains about that. We spend greater sums on other things, space exploration is a drop in the ocean
Exactly. We continue to feed the Military Industrial Complex to no end, yet people complain about programs that are a fraction of the national budget.
That’s a false dichotomy, we can and should do both.
Chris Utano this mission cost around £2.5billion. The UK government has so far spent £25billion on a covid track and trace system that doesn’t work.
Chris Utano A) knowledge is never a waste.
2) The engineering and science created was not sent to Mars. It’s still on earth, where we can continue to gain from it.
Chris Utano agree! Don’t know wtf Cristobal Colon what was thinking about when decide to spend time and money discovering America with all the problems in Spain those days.
Chris Utano A BIG dusty SHIZ HOLE!
Chris Utano, if we do go there, it’ll be a novelty trip.
Chris Utano I wouldn’t think it is habitable
But that’s not why we are studying it
Think of all the hungry that we could feed with that money
Chris Utano We can, should, and actually we are doing both. As said earlier, is a false dichotomy. And also, all that knowledge is already being seized in solving those very problems here om Earth (understanding better how it went for that planet, for example, and avoiding to repeat it here…)
Don’t they realize that this could cause the extinction of the endangered Martian Snail Darter?!
Slow news day?
Leave it, the Martians will clean it up eventually. ?
Dave Bottoms I wonder if they use Dyson for all that dust?
Terrie Jeanes. Lol… To paraphrase the movie Jaws, “I think we’re gonna need a bigger vacuum cleaner!” ?
Dave Bottoms RIGHT!!!!! LOL ?
It will give the space archeologists of some future civsilisation something to gush about and a way to understand what ours achieved.
Garbage on Mars, I’d be more concerned about garbage on the sides of most any road here in the US. Coming from people in vehicles!
Chris Utano
I’m all for science and exploration. Please don’t get me wrong. However, We have only explored 5 Percent of our Oceans here on earth. In 2019, we lost close to 30 soccer fields worth of trees every 60 seconds. Our ice caps are loosing 1.2 trillion tons of ice per year. Just saying maybe we need to start addressing these issues a little more seriously. We can check out Mars when were on track here on Earth.
Chris Utano It IS possible to do more than one thing at a time.
I agree. Just doesn’t seem like we are addressing those issues that Have become an immediate threat to our planet seriously enough.
The global effects of climate change will make the Covid pandemic look like candy land
Ironically – it’s easier to try and figure out a foreign planet than to unravel the human psychology / socio-economic / geo-political implications behind addressing global climate change. It’s weirdly (and sadly) the path of least resistance.
Perhaps
Phillip C Reed Possible? Yes. Enough being done to slow global warming? Not yet. Nowhere near.
You are correct but I get where Chris is coming from. I have no objections to exploring Mars with rovers, but I have some trepidation about future human missions due to the complexity, time commitment, cost and the irrelevant return on investment. This is where Chris’ point makes far more sense. We are perilously close to the point of no return with global warming, and to me our priorities are misplaced with our interest in Mars.
Consider that the primary scientific objective for Mars exploration is to understand how a planet which once had liquid water became an arid desert world. I think we should be more interested in what happened to Venus, a planet which experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, because it’s likely we’re headed that way.
Chris has it right. Melting ice caps reduces Earth’s ability to reflect sunlight back to space while simultaneously increasing the darker expanse of our oceans which absorbs more sunlight. We’re just getting warmer and warmer.
Deforestation also contributes to global warming in two ways. First, when trees are cut down, they can no longer pull C02 (a greenhouse gas) from the air from photosynthesis. Second, if burned or allowed to rot, a tree will release its store of carbon in the form of CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Note that all trees fall over and die naturally, and will release their carbon. A healthy forest however is balanced… net output of carbon dioxide from dying trees equals what it removes from the atmosphere by new trees which replace the dead trees. All that is taken away through deforestation. Without this natural check on CO2 entering our atmosphere, we accelerate our warming, melting our ice caps further, reducing earth’s albedo even more… etc…
I love NASA, I love what they do. But these are different times… we need a different way of thinking. And all this talk of ‘colonizing Mars’… and maybe ‘terraforming’ it someday? For what reason? It’s a ridiculous thought. It would be far simpler to save our own beautiful world, but we’ve so far shown zero inclination to do so.
Chris Utano You got it Bubba. It’s a tragedy. I won’t have to worry about it at age 60. My daughters will likely see more dramatic effects someday, and definitely their children will. If we continue to ignore this problem, my great grandcildren will have been given an untenable world I think.
Homo Sapiens has so far failed to prove we’re any different than parasites which eventually kill their host.
Chris Utano just in case you haven’t seen the drawing in the wall. Earth is a lost cause. Book your ticket to Mars were done here with earth
Izem Guendoud not yet my friend the earth still have some decade ?
Spain will launch a cleaning expedition on mars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=uUoBvXt0PjM
Mars is the only planet in the universe inhabited by Robots, am i wrong?
They keep this up and there will be global warming on Mars.