Perseverance photographs its landing debris

On Mars, there’s a unique kind of tumbleweed rolling across the Martian plains. These tumbleweeds aren’t plants they’re pieces of debris from the entry, descent and landing (EDL) hardware from NASA’s Perseverance rover. The rover has been coming across many of these remnants, photographing them so that engineers can study them.

During its landing on 18 February 2021, a number of hardware elements slowed the spacecraft’s speed from 20,000 kilometres (12,500 miles) per hour when it first entered the Martian atmosphere to essentially zero when it was gently placed on the surface by a sky crane – and that all happened in seven minutes. Once their jobs were complete, EDL hardware like the parachute, backshell, heat shield and the sky crane were all jettisoned from Perseverance, crashing into Mars some distance away from the rover so as not to damage it.

Over the past year and a half, the Perseverance team has spotted and catalogued around half a dozen pieces of suspected EDL debris. The first piece was discovered on 16 April 2022 when an unusually bright object was spotted in one of Perseverance’s panoramic Mastcam-Z photos. “No one knew what it was at the time, but perhaps the rover would take a closer look as it climbed up onto the delta in the coming weeks,” said NASA officials after the discovery.