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

Bring back Andy Griffith

[Hee Hee Hee]

Remember Salvage 1, where Andy Griffith plays a guy who wants to go to the moon to salvage all of the junk up there? Maybe he can reprise his role, and head off to Mars!

They make great reference points

[shiwala]

Maybe the garbage will have useful navigation purposes:

"Have the rover turn left at the heatshield and then go towards the parachute."

Mars Environmental Front alive and well

[kippy]

If you've read the Red Mars trilogy, you know about the hypothetical conflict between Mars preservationists "the Reds" and terraformists "the Greens". While these books are set in the future, within the Mars-nerd community people are already starting to form similar ranks. From scientists who condemn manned missions as contaminating a virgin planet to people already doing research on what greenhouse gas mixture to use to heat up the place. There is a NASA debate on this that got some press recently.

So whats the problem?

[adeyadey]

Gives the tourists something to see when they visit..

Seriously though, apart from the possibility of earth microbes messing things up (also exagerrated, I believe) its no problem - this is a PLANET people, its a pretty big area..

In the meantime we are becoming afraid of our own shadows, when it comes to space travel. For instance they decided to prematurely end the Galileo-Jupiter mission, even though the satellite was still operational (albeit low on fuel) for fear of loosing control of it and having it "contaminate" one of the moons. By all means, lets do some initial robot landings to check for microbes, but we should not be afraid to ultimately make human footprints in some of these places..