Perseverance Rover & Ingenuity

Perseverance is the most advanced spacecraft ever sent to the surface of Mars, and its mission goes a step beyond any before it: to actively search for signs of ancient life and to collect samples for eventual return to Earth. Launched by NASA in July 2020, it landed in February 2021 in Jezero Crater, a site chosen because it once held a lake fed by a river, complete with a preserved delta — exactly the kind of place where evidence of past life might be preserved.

The rover is a rolling laboratory equipped to examine rocks in fine detail, and it has confirmed that Jezero was indeed a watery, potentially habitable environment billions of years ago. Its defining task is sample caching: Perseverance drills cores of Martian rock and seals them in sterile tubes, building a collection that a future Mars Sample Return campaign aims to bring back to Earth, where laboratories far more powerful than anything that can fly to Mars could search them for biosignatures.

Perseverance also carried two groundbreaking technology demonstrations. MOXIE proved that oxygen can be produced from the carbon-dioxide atmosphere of Mars — a breakthrough for future human missions that will need breathable air and rocket propellant. And the Ingenuity helicopter, which rode to Mars attached to the rover's belly, achieved the first powered flight on another planet, opening an entirely new dimension of exploration. Together, these experiments make Perseverance not just a science mission but a scouting party for the human expeditions to come.