A bit of ingenuity has given space aficionados a glimpse of something they may never have thought possible — the wreckage of a spacecraft on the surface of Mars.
The pile of metal is from a spacecraft that is alien to Mars but came from Earth. It was the device that delivered Mars rover Perseverance to the red planet, CNN reported.
“There’s definitely a sci-fi element to it,” Ian Clark said, according to The New York Times. “It exudes otherworldly, doesn’t it?”
Clark is an engineer who worked on the mission’s parachute system.
Ingenuity took flight on April 19 for its one-year anniversary and found the parachute used for Perseverance’s landing on Feb. 18, 2021. It was on the way to a river delta that had flowed into a crater millions of years ago, the Times reported.
The helicopter also found the cone-shaped backshell that protected both the rover and chopper on its trip from Earth to the Mars surface, CNN reported.
The backshell, which is about 15 feet in diameter, created a debris field when it hit the surface at about 78 miles per hour, CNN and the Times reported.
The images were collected for the Mars Sample Return program that will hopefully bring Martian samples to Earth by the 2030s. The photos will allow crews to prepare for a safe landing on Mars and for an eventual launch from the planet’s surface.
The amazing photos were collected during Ingenuity’s 26th flight. It has flown 3.9 miles over the past year and logged about 49 minutes of flight time.