Perseverance

Perseverance, a NASA rover roughly the size of a car, has been operating on Mars since February 18, 2021. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 30, 2020, aboard an Atlas V rocket and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Mars 2020 mission. Its landing site, Jezero Crater, was selected because it contains an ancient river delta that could hold evidence of past microbial life. The rover’s primary tasks include hunting for signs of ancient life, examining the planet’s geology and climate, and gathering rock and regolith samples for a future mission to potentially bring back to Earth. It also tests technology for eventual human exploration, such as an experiment that successfully generated oxygen from Mars’ thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Perseverance is equipped with seven main scientific instruments, 19 cameras, and two microphones. It carried the helicopter Ingenuity, which in April 2021 achieved the first powered, controlled flight on another world. Originally planned for up to five flights, Ingenuity completed dozens before being retired in 2024. The rover is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, giving it an expected lifespan of more than a decade. It has sent back high-resolution panoramas, drilled and cached samples for later pickup, and identified rocks in Jezero Crater that may have been habitable for ancient microbes. In July 2024, it found the Cheyava Falls rock, which contains a “possible biosignature.” As of September 3, 2026, Perseverance had been active on Mars for 1,969 sols (2,023 total days, or 5 years and 197 days) since landing. The mission arose from a period of uncertainty in NASA’s Mars Exploration Program. After the Curiosity rover’s successful landing in 2012, budget cuts forced NASA to withdraw from a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency. By mid-2012, a program that had launched a mission to Mars every two years had no approved missions beyond 2013. In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a key report from the National Academies, recommended that NASA’s top priority for 2013–2022 be a joint NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return campaign—a four-mission effort to cache, retrieve, launch, and safely return Martian samples to Earth. It urged NASA to develop a sample-caching rover as the first step, with a cost cap of US$2.5 billion. In December 2012, following Curiosity’s success and the decadal survey’s guidance, NASA announced plans for a new rover by 2020. A science definition team convened for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013, recommending that the mission “select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache.”

Perseverance has four main science objectives: identify past environments that could have supported microbial life; search for signs of past microbial life in those environments, especially in rock types known to preserve such signs; collect core samples of rock and regolith, storing them onboard and on the surface as a backup for a future return mission; and test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere. Its first science campaign, “Crater Floor,” involved an arching drive south to the Séítah unit for remote sensing, then back to the Crater Floor Fractured Rough to collect the first core sample, concluding at the Octavia E. Butler landing site. The second campaign, “Fan Front,” took months of travel to “Three Forks,” where the rover accessed the base of the ancient Neretva river delta and ascended a valley wall to the northwest. The third and fourth campaigns were “Upper Fan” and “Margin Unit.” The fifth campaign, “Northern Rim,” began in December 2024 and explores the northern part of Jezero’s southwestern rim, studying rocks thrown up from deep inside Mars by the impact that formed the crater 3.9 billion years ago. As of 2025, the mission has yielded discoveries about Jezero Crater’s volcanic history, habitability, and the role of water. Instead of all rocks being sedimentary and transported by wind or water, several types of igneous rock were found, showing evidence of interaction with water. At a rock named “Wildcat Ridge,” located in Jezero’s well-preserved sedimentary fan deposit, Perseverance found evidence of an ancient lake environment. The sediments were likely deposited in a standing body of water and continued to interact with water long after formation. The environments recorded at Wildcat Ridge would have been habitable for ancient microbial life, and the rock type is ideal for preserving possible signs of ancient life.