NASA's Perseverance Rover has beamed back from Mars a picture of a “strange tangle” — an object that looks like a partially uncoiled ball of string or, in the imagination of some, a rather long and thin noodle. What's this picture? The picture shows the object — string or noodle — between two Martian rocks, a smaller, flat one to the right and a larger one to the left. Another, zoomed-out, view shows the scale of the object, lying directly beneath the Perseverance Rover close to its wheels, with other rocks and a bit of the Martian landscape also in the frame. The image was taken on July 12 by the Perseverance Rover's Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A. As the rover moves, its six HazCams detect hazards like large rocks, trenches, or sand dunes. The picture, which trended on the Internet, became Perseverance's “Image of the Week” for Week 74 (July 10-16, 2022) of the mission. The “Image of the Week” is picked after a public vote Why is the picture odd? For obvious reasons — unless you don't have difficulty imagining the existence of Martians who both love and litter their spaghetti. NASA has said nothing officially about what the object might be, or how it got in the frame of Perseverance's HazCam. And why it probably isn't. The object is likely to be space junk from NASA's Mars mission. Such extraterrestrial trash has been spotted on the red planet earlier too. The un-Martian objects imaged on Mars so far include the parachute used by Perseverance during its landing in February last year. In June, the rover captured a shiny object on the Martian ground, which Perseverance said on Twitter was “something unexpected” — before identifying it as “part of a thermal blanket — a material used to control temperatures” during its descent to the surface last year. But it still wondered: “My descent stage crashed about 2 km away. Did this piece land here after that, or was it blown here by the wind?”
