The Perseverance Rover was delivered safely to the Martian surface thanks to a complex set of components, including a parachute and backshell. Now, ingenuity has scoped out what became of them after they did their job. On this special episode of Mars Guy. In the previous episode, I showed how the most recent flight of the ingenuity helicopter did not make progress toward its ultimate destination, the ancient river delta. Turns out that it had flown back to check out the parachute and backshell, which were imaged shortly after landing by the high-rise camera from orbit, and recently by the MassCam Z camera on Perseverance. Ingenuity's flight path has now been updated on the official map. Here's a stadium for scale, and here I've added the parachute and backshell from the most recent high-rise image. This shows that ingenuity flew around these components, and the images that captured are spectacular. In the history of Mars exploration, there's never been the opportunity to get this kind of bird's-eye view of spacecraft hardware. Here's Mars Guy for scale. Ingenuity flew at 8 meters or about 26 feet in altitude. The objective was to provide images that might be useful to engineers planning the Mars sample return mission, but for the rest of us, these images clearly show one of the realities of landing on Mars. A parachute alone, even the biggest one ever used, can't safely land a spacecraft. This backshell impacted at about 78 miles per hour or 126 KPH. That's because the atmosphere of Mars is so thin, less than 1% the density of Earth's atmosphere. Even so, every landed mission to Mars has used a parachute to help slow things down before the final descent stage takes over, a jetpack in the case of Perseverance, but also airbags in the case of three previous missions. A backshell and heat shield encapsulated the rover and jetpack, protecting them from the frictional heating of atmospheric entry at about 12,500 miles per hour, 20,000 KPH, reaching about 2400 degrees Fahrenheit or 1300 degrees C. The backshell used an aluminum honeycomb structure that was hand packed with a super light ablative material made of cork and silicone, and yes, cork is used in all sorts of thermal protection applications for spacecraft. Although these artifacts of the Perseverance mission may never be displayed in the Smithsonian Museum, they likely will become revered monuments of the quest to explore Mars.