The first spacecraft to land on MarsSpace archaeology

At the centre of this picture is a blob thought to be the parachute from the first mission to survive a trip to Mars’s surface—the Soviet Union’s Mars 3, which arrived in 1971. The picture is part of a larger image taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, an American craft that has been circling the planet since 2006. The work of hunting through the 1.8 billion pixels in the original image was done by Russian space enthusiasts. Besides the parachute, they reckon they have found Mars 3’s heat shield and the probe itself. It is the latest development in the nascent field of space archaeology, which studies the history of space flight. In March a team led by Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, made the biggest discovery yet, when it raised engine parts from one of America’s Saturn V moon rockets from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

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