Noodle-like object on Mars

[Insider]

Last month, NASA's Perseverance rover, currently roaming on Mars, took a rare photo of a shiny silver object wedged between two rocks on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater and beamed it back to Earth for all to see.

The object, it turned out, was a piece of the rover's own junk.

"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," Perseverance team members wrote on Twitter at the time.

An interesting piece of debris that could come from the rover​

Now, the crafty rover has spotted yet another interesting piece of debris, this time in the shape of spaghetti. The image was taken on Tuesday, and it's got researchers confused.


So far, we know that it comes from one of the rover's front-facing hazard avoidance cameras that keep an eye on the landscape to protect the rover when it's driving or using its robotic arm. But we don't yet know what it is.

The most plausible explanation is that it could be junk from NASA's Mars mission, just like the previously spotted object. After all, we are pretty sure there are no spaghetti restaurants up on Mars.

Other aircraft have also taken images of human junk on Mars. In April, Mars' chopper Ingenuity, which came to Mars at the same time as Perseverance, took aerial images of the wreckage of the descent shell and parachute.

NASA's Perseverance rover has spotted a noodle-like object on Mars

What could it be?

interestingengineering.com