NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Had Mystery Debris Stuck to Its Leg

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter simply accomplished its thirty third flight on Mars, and this one featured an sudden twist: unidentified particles caught to one among its lander legs.

Ingenuity’s navigation digital camera, or NavCam, captured pictures of the hitchhiker throughout the aerial jaunt on September 24, NASA wrote in a status update. Images present the helicopter taking off with the particles dangling from one among its legs, a lot like a bit of bathroom paper caught to a shoe. As Ingenuity strikes by the air, the particles detaches from the lander leg and floats off into the space.

NASA famous that the particles was not current in NavCam pictures from Ingenuity’s earlier flight, and that each one information from the helicopter’s devices are nominal—that means the particles is probably going not from Ingenuity itself. While it definitely seems like plastic, NASA says that the Ingenuity staff is engaged on figuring out what precisely it is and the place it got here from. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab didn’t instantly reply to Gizmodo’s request for extra data.

During flight quantity 33—and it’s wonderful to jot down that, provided that the unique mission known as for simply 5 take a look at flights—Ingenuity was supposed to be within the air for just below a minute, reaching an altitude of 33 toes (10 meters) and traversing about 365 toes (111 meters).

This is not the primary time we’ve noticed particles on Mars. In July, the Perseverance rover imaged what regarded like a wad of Martian spaghetti, and in April, Ingenuity received a photograph of the crumpled mess of touchdown gear that helped Perseverance contact down on Mars, which is now part of the planet’s dusty panorama for the foreseeable future.