As humans, we’ve gotten used to leaving our rubbish and trash behind at places we go to. It’s all part of our habit of littering and polluting our own planet.
But, it appears that we’re also polluting other planets now.
According to Cagri Kilic, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Robotics at the West Virginia University in the United States, he shared that there’s a good 7,119kgs of human waste that has been left on Mars from various space exploration projects throughout the years.
In fact, recently, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover took this picture of what many assumed was space pasta, but it turns out that it was a piece of netting material.
To be specific, 14 countries have sent 18 man-made objects to the red planet over the span of 50 years. Some of these projects are still ongoing while the others litter the surface of Mars including discarded hardware, and inactive and crashed spacecrafts.
While littering on planet Earth can cause significant damage to our environment, leaving trash behind on Mars can also contaminate the samples of Martian debris collected on active and future exploration missions.
And while the human trash found on Mars are being dubbed as ‘early milestones for human planetary exploration’, doesn’t it feel wrong that we’ve basically just trashed a whole other planet?
We just hope that it doesn’t piss off any Martians at this point.
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