Daily Mail
Scientific exploration has left more than 15,000 pounds of equipment on Mars in the past 50 years, even though humans have yet to set foot on the Red Planet.
The equipment includes discarded instruments, inactive spacecraft and those that crashed to the surface. There is a lot of speculation about when humans will reach our neighbor’s planet, but robots rule Mars for the time being.
Kajri Kilic, a postdoctoral research fellow in robotics at West Virginia University, analyzed the mass of all rovers and orbiters sent to Mars and subtracted the weight of what is currently in operation.
Not only are humans polluting another planet, but scientists fear that the debris could contaminate samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is currently searching for ancient life on Mars.
One scientist estimated that there is 15,694 pounds of trash on Mars, most of which stems from neglected devices like this thermal blanket that protects NASA’s perseverance and survives through the atmosphere.
The rover, which collects samples from Mars that will be returned to Earth, took pictures of the waste during its mission, and in June the NASA team on Earth spotted a light far away in an image sent by “Perseverance”, and then directed the rover to look, after a few weeks, the “Perseverant” entered the Hogwallow Flats area and got On the Mastcam-Z high-resolution 360-degree panorama.
The Creativity Helicopter took a picture of the landing gear used as it arrived with the Perseverance craft, and the photos were a canopy and a cone-shaped rear cover that protected the rover in space.
The Daily Mail reported that there are a total of nine inactive spacecraft sitting on the surface of Mars, including the Mars 3 probe, the Mars 6 probe, the Viking 1 lander, the Viking 2 probe, the Sojourner rover, the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli probe, and the Phoenix probe. and Spirit, as well as dead robots on Mars.