NASA's Perseverance robot 'litters' on Mars

The Perseverance robot photographed the Martian landscape with the wheel tracks and drill bits it left on the red planet's surface last year.

NASA's Perseverance robot on February 16 photographed the tip of a drill it discarded last year.

NASA's Perseverance robot used the left Mastcam-Z camera to capture a special image on February 16, the 353rd Mars day of the mission (Mars day is slightly longer than Earth day). Mastcam-Z is a camera duo mounted on a raised pole by Perseverance.

In the image, in addition to the typical rocky and dusty Martian landscape, the viewer can see the wheel tracks of Perseverance. Besides, a cylindrical man-made object also attracted great attention. This is essentially a part that the robot discarded in July 2021.

The drill head is installed before launch to seal the drill bit and protect the contents, said the Perseverance operations team. In order to perform its scientific duties well, the robot abandoned it before starting to collect samples with brand new and pristine drill bits.

This is not the first "garbage" piece of Perseverance on Mars. In March 2021, it discarded a belly shield that was used to protect its sampling system during landing.

These items may one day become objects of interest to space archaeologists. The robots themselves will also exist on Mars long after completing the mission, and the pieces of trash they leave along the way will be a historical trace of the process of moving on the red planet.

Perseverance and the small Ingenuity helicopter landed in the Jezero crater on February 18, 2021. After more than a year of exploring Mars, the duo has achieved many achievements such as drilling for rock samples on another planet for the first time, extracting oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for the first time and performing the first controlled flight. first on another planet.