Star Wars Fans Think the Perseverance Rover Left a Lightsaber on Mars

By Russ Burlingame

Star Wars fans took to social media this weekend to have a little fun with images from Mars. NASA's Mars rover Perseverance dropped a sample tube -- a collection of rocks picked up elsewhere on the Red Planet -- at the site of its planned Mars Sample Return, a complex NASA-European Space Agency collaborative mission aimed at getting those rocks back to Earth for study in the next 20 years. According to CNet, the plan is for the Sample Retrieval Lander to launch in 2028, kicking off the mission in earnest. That would get samples back to labs on Earth by the mid-2030s.

So, what does all that have to do with Star Wars? Fans (and even the Jet Propulsion Lab's director) took to social media to make jokes about how much the sample tube looks like the handle of a light saber. 

You can see an image from the rover below.

The plan for the depot is to have the rover deliver the samples to the recovery craft, but if the rover doesn't last that long, there will be alternate ways of recovering them on board the recovery mission.

It isn't just Star Wars fans who reacted to this -- as you can imagine, Doctor Who fans thought it looked more like a Sonic Screwdriver rather than a light saber...but Star Wars totally overwhelmed Twitter for a while.

You can see some of our favorite responses below.

...And we can't ignore this observation about Mars's makeup.

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No, you aren't. Trust us.

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That explains it!

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Some researchers getting in on the fun

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BREAKING!...Or nah.

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No comment yet from the Skywalker clan

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But the JPL is in

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Lots of variations on this observation, too...

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