You know how it is – something gets mystify to your foot , and when it comes loose you ca n’t work out what it was or if your skid needed it . Some problems follow humanity everywhere , and perhaps this is one of them , with theIngenuity helicopterdropping something nameless on the airfoil of Mars during its 33rdflight .

NASA ’s prescribed comment on the matter is fairly juiceless . “ A minuscule piece of extraneous object rubble ( FOD ) was seen in footage from the Mars eggbeater ’s navigation camera ( Navcam ) for a portion of its 33rdflight , ” thestatementreads , without speculating on the nature of the FOD .

NASA does also inform us the FOD “ was not visible in Navcam footage from the late flight ” , but was seen from the 33rdflight ’s outset until around halfway through , when it drop . There is “ No reading of fomite price [ … ] team are run to spot the source of the junk , ” the statementcontinues .

Image Credit : NASA / JPL - Caltech

The item ( top rightfield if you missed it ) looks much more like a plastic purse or small-arm of clingstone - wrap than anything Ingenuity would have acquired on Mars , but there is no indication of how it got there .

Even if someone at JPL was lax enough to dangle their lunch wrapper in the Atlas V that channel that admit Ingenuity ( and Perseverance ) to the cerise planet , it seems a bit unlikely it would be invisible for 32 missions – in all likelihood not as improbable as aliens leaving some trash on the Martian surface for Ingenuity ’s invertebrate foot to catch on , though . Perseverance ’s observation in August ofsome of the nettingjettisoned during its chute landing may be more relevant here .

The detail in question credibly weigh a fraction of a gram , as compare to the 7,119 kilograms ( 15,694 punt ) of debrisrecently calculatedto be on the Martian surface as a resolution of current and premature robot delegation . However , where most of the Martian fomite are probable to continue in one piece and eventually be covered by the desert sands , this looks like the kind of thing that could be blown almost anywhere by even the thin Martian atmosphere . mayhap that would make it an nameless flying target .

Having been hit with afine for litteringfrom an Australian local council after part of Skylab landed on them , NASA may be relieved there ’s no Martian authorisation to do the same .

That say , we should n’t be too hard on the Ingenuity team . Not only have they managed to make a helicopter pilot on another planet – one with a very tenuous atmosphere at that – but a charge contrive for five flights has dispatch another 28 and is still going . This bodes well for the use of whirlybird onfuture mission – and meanwhile , Ingenuity has operated as an effective scout for Perseverance in its seeking to collect the most interesting samples for storage and futurereturn to Earth .