Wait, HOW many pounds?
, it's a little uncomfortable to consider our growing impact on our planetary neighbor.According to Kilic, Mars debris originates from three main sources: discarded hardware, inactive spacecraft, and crashed spacecraft.
One of the reasons there’s so much debris left behind is from the current method of landing on the planet’s surface. To safely enter and pass through the atmosphere, a spacecraft comes clad in a disposable heatshield and deploys a parachute to slow down in time before nearing the ground. Naturally, all that stuff gets discarded.
In addition, between two to four crashed spacecraft lie ruined somewhere on the Martian surface, a solemn reminder that landing on the planet is a precarious task that requires meticulously planned execution. Pollution in itself is not great, but the main concern to NASA scientists is that it may risk current and future missions. The last thing you'd want is for some junk to get tangled up in a state-of-the-art rover like Perseverance. There's also the threat of contaminating samples collected by the rover — but so far, that risk is considered to be low.
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