Perseverance's shot of string. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Ingenuity, a small helicopter that arrived on Mars with Perseverance, has also captured extensive aerial images of the smashed descent stage. The helicopter, which is the first aircraft to perform powered flight on another planet, captured the wreckage during its 26th cruise over the Martian surface in April. The images revealed the remains of the vehicle’s supersonic parachutes and backshell, which is part of the jet-powered stage that carefully lowered Perseverance on Mars.The mission’s series of encounters with its own space junk—or Martian artifacts, if you prefer—offer a reminder that our expanding presence off Earth includes the spent parts that we leave on extraterrestrial surfaces. But in exchange for being mild interplanetary litterbugs, Perseverance and its predecessor, Curiosity, are discovering plenty of new insights and weird natural objects on Mars, enabling us to experience otherworldly vistas through the eyes of our robotic explorers.