Mountains of trash that humans generate on Mars

Although humans have never set foot on Mars, artificial waste from landers and rovers still piles up on the red planet .

A new map reveals the location of debris from vehicles landing on Mars over the past 53 years, including NASA's decommissioned Ingenuity helicopter, the Mail reported on January 31. This trash includes metal landing gear, heat shields, used parachutes, broken rotor blades, pod noses and even fabric nets. Cagri Kilic, a professor of aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, estimates that the amount of human trash on Mars is up to 7,119kg , equivalent to the weight of an adult African elephant.

The parachute and cone-shaped cover protect the Perseverance self-propelled robot when landing. (Photo: NASA).

Examples of human-made trash on the red planet include Russia's Mars 2 lander, which became the first man-made object to touch the surface of Mars when it crashed in May 1971. Beagle 2, a Russian spacecraft, landed on the red planet in December 2023 but was later lost. Now, the latest object to join the above vehicles is NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which was unable to continue flying after a rotor blade broke off on January 18. Due to a broken rotor and no wheels, the helicopter was stuck in place, unable to move, although it still maintained contact with the control team on the ground.

These vehicles demonstrated exceptional achievements when flying to a planet 225 million kilometers from Earth, and many of the machines performed valuable scientific experiments while on the ground. Professor Alice Gorman, a space archaeologist at Flinders University in Australia, likens the decommissioned landers to a historical record of human engagement with Mars. "Ingenuity shows how far the technology we need to adapt to environments on other planets can go ," Gorman said.

But when the machines stopped working, they turned Mars into a landfill. Dr. James Blake, a space debris researcher at the University of Warwick, believes that future missions to Mars should be designed with sustainability as a priority. It is a spacecraft design that does not release parts when landing on Mars, or returns to Earth when the mission ends. Manned missions to Mars in a few decades could land on the planet and collect space debris.

Including Ingenuity, nearly 20 landers have reached the Martian surface via successful soft landings or hard falls. Currently, many landers that fall to the ground exist as debris or even burn trails, evidence that they successfully reached Mars before falling on their final leg. An example is NASA's Mars Polar lander which crashed while trying to land at the south pole in December 1999. A photo of the spacecraft's crash site released in 2005 includes the parachute and a patch of Martian dust burned by the rocket engine. Another similar example is Italy's Schiaparelli lander, which crashed into the surface of Mars at a speed of 306 km/h in October 2016. Schiaparelli left a black dot surrounded by the ship's heat shield and parachute.

Other spacecraft that landed and were able to complete their missions also left traces during their operations. NASA's Opportunity rover, which operated from 2004 to mid-2008, created trash trails while traveling on the red planet. The robot weighing about 157 kg is currently stuck in the Martian soil. It transmitted a photo of the heat shield taken in 2004 with debris scattered on the ground for several kilometers. According to Kilic, most of the robots remain intact and space agencies treat them as historical monuments instead of trash.