Terrestrial Garbage On Mars

An anonymous reader writes "The garbage left behind by the twin Mars rovers was highlighted this week by the close-up view in panorama of the Spirit rovers' heatshield. Not including the various Viking, Pathfinder and some crippled probes, the human contribution of rover hardware to the martian surface now includes a few odd nicknacks, parachutes, heatshields, back shell,landing petals and many wheel tracks. It may be September before the rovers themselves become part of the red planet's debris field."

Comments

Cowards

[Anonymous Coward]

While anonymous the coward submitting this story still doesn't have the guts to say why he listed all these facts. I'll have to guess he thinks it's a wrong to make that mess. Does anyone really think that's such a big mess?

It's less mess than a single paper clip in my back yard. If that's the only mess we make on Mars, I'm going to be very sad and disappointed.

Yes, I am a bleeding heart liberal quasi-socialist envormentalist. It's not like we're covering Mars with buckyballs or anything. :-)

Today's Trash is Tomorrow's Treasure

[waynegoode]

After seeing pictures of the debris on Mars a few weeks ago, I considered making a mock "Mars Enviromental Front" page protesting the Earth's littering and distrubing of the Martian ecology. But, truth can be stranger than fiction.

Keep it in perpective! It's not that much debris and there really is no other way to carry out these missions.

In a hundred years or so, when Mars is colonized, there will probably be museams at the landing spots of the various rovers with all their debris collected and displayed. People will pass by and ooh and aah at our antique technology.

So long as we know what's important...

[Dinosaur Neil]

This feels like a joke, but there are people who might well invest some serious effort in "Keeping Mars Clean". My advisor was involved in the Voyager "Grand Tour" mission back at JPL in the 70's and he was telling me that when the launch was first announced, a group of people protested that Voyager was "stealing energy" from Jupiter with its gravity-assist maneuver. They were concerned that if enough probes were sent that way, Jupiter's orbit would be irrevokably altered. No, really. Obviously not a lot of math skills involved...

Re:Life on Mars

[anubi]

Yeh, at this time, you are modded "funny", however I think you are quite insightful.

I have a very big curiousity about if they find anything kinda, well shall we say, of extraterrestrial origin, on the moon or Mars. My rationale being I have no idea how life really started on Earth. There are a few theories floating around stating the possibility of life being "seeded" on Earth by spaceborne visitors. Unfortunately, any evidence left by these spaceborne visitors will have been destroyed either by the elements or man himself ( you know, the same way we have "lost" the Ark of the Covenant - which isn't really all that old! ).

If we were indeed seeded here, I consider the possibility that the ones who seeded us left some additional info on neighboring planets, knowing full good and well that that info would not be accessible to us until we found a way to get to it and hopefully would be sufficiently advanced to understand it in lieu of holding it as some sort of religious trophy and fighting over it, most likely having it destroyed in the process.

I was thinking if I were to seed a planet with life, with full anticipation it would eventually advance to interplanetary capability, I would leave some documentation on a neighboring planet void of weathering conditions ( I thought the moon was ideal for this ) so that it would stay out of harm's way until the life I had seeded had passed my "intelligence test" of being able to get to it.