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In July, Perseverance sent a fresh photo from the Red Planet, which showed what looked like a tangle of threads or part of a winding. On the Web, this find was dubbed “noodles.” NASA experts could not immediately identify the object, but a few weeks later put forward their version.
This thread is a piece of crushed mesh material dacron, which is made on the basis of polyester fibers. It was he who was used in the thermal coating of the Sky Crane landing platform, which was responsible for the safe descent of the rover. The same dacron was probably seen in one of the previous photos – with “xenomorph skin”.
Justin Mackie, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, added that the appearance of a piece of this tangled and degraded mesh suggests that it has been subjected to a very powerful impact. However, this is not surprising, because the landing platform after delivering Perseverance crashed away from the rover, which is a planned part of the mission. Below is the landing video.
Finding the wreckage of a landing platform in itself is not unusual for rovers, but the number of objects found by Perseverance seems a little unexpected for NASA. The landing was deliberately made a couple of kilometers from the scientific research site, but the rover continues to detect various debris and parts of the Sky Crane.
For example, this is how the parachute crash site and parts of the rear panel of the Perseverance lander look like. The picture was taken back in April using an Ingenuity helicopter.
The team plans to closely examine all the debris they find to make sure it won’t affect the mission or end up among the samples they’re planning to bring back from Mars to Earth.
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