Perseverance rover discovers 'unexpected' piece of foil on Mars; NASA explains its origin

NASA's robotic explorer Perseverance has spotted 'something unexpected' on Mars while hunting for signs of life in the Jezero crater. Taking to Twitter, the rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) revealed that the object nestled between small rocks is a shiny bit of foil that was part of Perseverance's thermal blanket. According to the mission team, the rover descended two kilometres away so the question that remains is whether the foil got blown away in the wind. 

"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", the rover team wrote in a tweet. "That shiny bit of foil is part of a thermal blanket – a material used to control temperatures. It’s a surprise finding this here", another tweet read.

The thermal blanket is what Perseverance was wrapped in when it made a fiery descent through the red planet's atmosphere last February. The blanket has a job to provide just the right amount of heat -- not too much and not too little -- for a spacecraft, or rover, in this case, to operate carefully. Perseverance's new discovery comes just a few months after the Ingenuity helicopter, which has acted as a scout for the rover, found landing gears from two years ago. 

Ingenuity's discovery of Perseverance's gear

The photographs shared by JPL featured the entry, descent and landing gear which were used to ensure a safe landing of Perseverance. In the images, there was a "cone-shaped back shell", that shielded the rover during its journey and landing, along with an aeroshell and its 70.5-foot-wide parachute, which was the biggest ever deployed on Mars.  

The landing gears were turned to rubble as a result of the "fast-paced and stressful" entry including gravitational forces, high temperatures, and other extremes that Perseverance endured. Notably, the SUV-sized rover made its entry into the Martian atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 kph which called for extra-careful maneuverability while touching down on the red planet.