Thursday, September 18, 2008

Our Martian Junkyard


From NASA's web site, "The Phoenix Mars Lander's Surface Stereo Imager took this image of the spacecraft's crumpled heat shield (the snake-like looking thing center-left in the picture) on Sept. 16, 2008, the 111th Martian day of the mission."

Seeing this picture, it got me thinking, with all of the probes we sent to Mars that have either landed or crashed there, the Red Planet is amassing a growing collection of high tech American made garbage and all of the detritus associated with it. It's a good thing there are no Martians there, otherwise they probably would be really pissed off at us. Then again, maybe some ingenious Martians might like the chance to toy around with all of that free electronic gadgetry we've been sending them, courtesy of the American taxpayers!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think "amass" is really the right word. :-)

Humans have sent less than 100 probes to Mars altogether, and that includes the ones that stay in orbit. There are less than 30 that have actually landed.

Now compare that number to the number of artificial satellites we have around our planet...

Tommykey said...

Yeah, but Mars is a lot smaller than Earth.

tina FCD said...

Damn, thought you had a photo of life on Mars. :)
It really does make you wonder what all is really out there in space....