ChinaVirtuoso

Remember that Sesame Street song One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)? NASA's Perseverance rover spotted something that was not like the others on Mars. On June 13, Percy snapped a photo of a rock that had a strange-looking object stuck on it.

The object is a piece of foil with dots visible all across it. "My team has spotted something unexpected: It's a piece of a thermal blanket that they think may have come from my descent stage, the rocket-powered jet pack that set me down on landing day back in 2021," the rover team tweeted on Wednesday.

NASA JPL spokesperson Andrew Good told CNET the piece is definitely from a thermal blanket. "Less definite is which part of the spacecraft it came from – the team thinks the descent stage is a good possibility – or how exactly it got here (descent stage crashed two kilometers away; whether it landed here after that crash or was blown by the wind isn't something we know)," Good said in an email.
A closer look at the piece of foil shows the regular dots across its surface.

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