by On Mars, a unique type of “tumbleweed” is rolling across the Martian plains.
These tumbleweeds are not plants – they are pieces of debris from entry, descent and landing (EDL) hardware from NASA’s endurance rover. Percy is coming across many of these remains, photographing them so that engineers can study them.
During a landing on February 18, 2021, several hardware features slowed the spacecraft from 12,500 mph (20,000 kph) when it first entered the Martian atmosphere to essentially zero miles per hour when a sky crane gently placed it on the surface. And all that happened in just seven minutes.
Related: 7 new minutes of terror: Watch the Mars landing stages of NASA’s Perseverance rover in this video.
Once their jobs were complete, the EDL hardware such as the parachute, backshell, heat shield, and sky crane were all removed from the Endurance rover, crashing to Mars some distance from the rover to avoid damage.
Over the past year and a half, the Persistence team has spotted and cataloged around half a dozen pieces of suspected EDL rubbish. The first piece was discovered on April 16, 2022, when an unusually bright object was spotted in one of Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z panoramic images. “The material was given a descriptive name: “bright matter”. blog post (opens in a new tab).
Several months later, Perseverance made it to that place in the delta, called Hogwallow Flats. On June 12, 2022, he photographed the mysterious object, suspected to be a piece of multi-layer insulation (MLI) from the sky crane, made of Perforated Aluminized Kapton (PAK) or Mylar, fluttering in the wind like a flag. . In the same region, the rover also captured a picture of a knotted fastball of “string matter”. That could be Dacron, a netting used in thermal blankets, according to the operations team.
Interestingly, Hogwallow Flats is more than 1.25 miles (two kilometers) away from the EDL Perseverance hardware crash zones. “Hogwallow Flats appears to be a natural collection point for wind-blown EDL debris,” notes NASA.
Perseverance helicopter companion Intellect Some of the EDL rubbish was closely followed. On April 19, 2022, Ingenuity flew over the Perseverance rucksack and parachute crash site, taking high-resolution images of the debris.
It is not uncommon for such fields of debris to be accidentally thrown on Mars, as landings on the Red Planet are usually violent events. Both are the opportunity and Curiosity Rovers are also photographed with suspected EDL debris themselves.
For now, the top priority is landing spacecraft safely on Mars, but as we continue to plant rovers on the planet, researchers will have to consider the effects of such a waste of space. “Engineers designing EDL hardware for future missions will need to consider the impact (literally) of their designs on Mars and mission requirements,” NASA said.
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