People littered Mars with tons of waste: it weighs like an elephant

Despite the fact that man has never even set foot on the planet, space debris created by man is already accumulating on Mars, writes the Daily Mail.

A new map shows the locations of debris from spacecraft that have landed on Mars over the past 53 years, including the now defunct Ingenuity helicopter.

This debris includes pieces of metal landing equipment, heat shields, used parachutes, cut-off rotor blades, drill bits and even fabric mesh.

Kagri Kilic, a professor of aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, estimates that Mars already contains a staggering 15,694 pounds of human-made debris.

As the Daily Mail explains, to put it in perspective, that’s about the same weight as a full-grown African elephant!

Examples include the Soviet Mars 2 lander, which became the first man-made object to touch the surface of Mars when it crash-landed in May 1971. There’s also Beagle 2, a British spacecraft that landed on the Red Planet in December 2003 but was subsequently lost. Now they’ve been joined by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, which is no longer able to fly after one of its rotor blades broke on January 18.

Of course, all of these spacecraft demonstrated the remarkable feat of reaching a planet 140 million miles away, and many of them performed decent science experiments once they landed, writes the Daily Mail. But once the machines stop working on Mars, they stay there, turning the Red Planet into something of a landfill.

Dr James Blake, a space debris researcher at the University of Warwick, told MailOnline that future missions to Mars should be “designed with sustainability in mind”.

This could potentially include spacecraft designs that do not shed components when landing on Mars or that can return back to Earth after completing their mission.

“Space missions routinely discard debris and rovers or helicopters sometimes encounter debris fields during exploration,” Dr Blake told MailOnline. “With current technology, there is still an unfavorable balance that needs to be struck between scientific discoveries and the impact of missions on the natural environment of these missions.” distant worlds.”

Future manned missions to Mars could potentially collect space debris, but this may not happen for several decades.

“If and when humans migrate to Mars, the debris will be buried under a layer of dust,” Dr Blake added. “It is likely that future colonies will go looking for these relics as historical artifacts, in much the same way that archaeologists look for them here on Earth. By then, though, we’ll probably be making a mess of the planet in other ways!”

Back in February 2021, the Ingenuity helicopter ended up on Mars in the belly of its car-sized parent rover, Perseverance, which is still active. Perseverance has dropped all sorts of debris around Mars’ Jezero Crater, including its cone-shaped containment shell, a thermal blanket and even a fabric mesh.

Shortly after its release, Ingenuity made history in April 2021 when it made the first-ever powered flight on another planet.

Although Ingenuity, according to NASA, “exceeded expectations” (the helicopter flew “dozens more flights than planned,” the agency says), it is now essentially defunct. Due to damage to the main rotor and the fact that it has no wheels, it is stuck in place and cannot move, despite communicating with ground controllers.

Professor Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia, said the defunct landers provided “archaeological evidence of human interaction with Mars.”

“The ingenuity shows how much technology we need to adapt to different planetary environments,” she told MailOnline. “It also has huge social implications because so many people were fascinated by the little helicopter that showed us new views of Mars.”

Including Ingenuity, nearly 20 landers have reached the surface of Mars, either making a successful soft landing or an unsuccessful crash landing.

Now many of these crash-landers exist as fragments or even just scorch marks – often evidence that they successfully made it to Mars before falling at the final hurdle. A good example is NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, which crashed while attempting to land at the planet’s south pole in December 1999. Images of what was believed to be the crash site of the Polar lander, including its parachute and a patch of Martian dust scorched by rocket shells, were published in 2005.

A similar example is the Italian Schiaparelli lander, which crashed into the surface of Mars at 190 mph in October 2016. Schiaparelli left behind a black blur surrounded by heat shields and a parachute, images later showed.

Meanwhile, the British Beagle 2 lander was due to land on Mars on Christmas Day 2003, but unfortunately contact with the vehicle was lost. It wasn’t until 2015 that Beagle 2 and its scattered landing gear were photographed by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The images showed that Beagle 2 actually made a soft landing, and not an emergency landing, as originally thought.

Other spacecraft that successfully landed on Mars and were able to complete their missions left behind debris. NASA’s Opportunity rover, which operated from 2004 to mid-2018, left a trail of debris as it crossed the Red Planet. This rover weighs about 347 pounds and is now stuck in the Martian mud. In 2004, he sent NASA a photo of his heat shield along with debris that littered the ground for miles.

Imogen Napper, a marine scientist at the University of Plymouth, said studying our solar system is “obviously important” but also stressed the need for “sustainable development”.

“There’s a great opportunity here to learn from the various mistakes we’ve made with the accumulation of waste and rubbish on Earth and use that to guide environmental protection beyond our planet,” she told MailOnline.

Most of the robots are still intact, Kilic said, and space agencies view them as historical artifacts rather than discarded trash.

“Wear takes its toll on everything on the surface of Mars,” he wrote in a 2022 article for the Conversation. The real reason debris on Mars is important is because of its place in history. Spacecraft and their debris are early milestones in human exploration of the planet.”