TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
String theory: NASA Mars rover discovers mystery object
Is it tumbleweed? A piece of fishing line? Spaghetti? An object discovered by NASA's Mars rover has intrigued space watchers.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
This image obtained from NASA and taken by the Mars Perseverance rover on July 12, 2022, show what appear to be string on the red planet. (AFP/Handout/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Is it tumbleweed? A piece of fishing line? Spaghetti?
A tangled object discovered by NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has intrigued space watchers, leaving some musing tongue-in-cheek about the quality of Italian dining on the Red Planet.
But the most plausible explanation is more prosaic: it's likely remnants of a component used to lower the robotic explorer to the Martian surface in February 2021.
"We have been discussing where it's from, but there's been speculation that it's a piece of cord from the parachute or from the landing system that lowers the rover to the ground," a spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.
"Note that we don't have confirmation that it's one or the other," he added.
The bundle of debris was first spotted July 12 by the rover's front left hazard avoidance camera -- but when Perseverance returned to the same spot four days later, it was gone.
It was probably carried away by wind, like a piece of a thermal blanket that might have come from the rocket-powered landing system, which was spotted last month.
The accumulating trash left behind by Perseverance is considered a small price to pay for the rover's noble scientific goals of searching for biosignatures of ancient microbial life forms.
And these items may one day become valuable artifacts for future Mars colonists.
"In a hundred years or so Martians will be eagerly collecting up all this stuff and either putting it on display in museums or making it into 'historical jewelry,'" tweeted amateur astronomer Stuart Atkinson.
