Perseverance is a NASA rover that has been exploring Mars since February 18, 2021, as part of the Mars 2020 mission. Built and managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the car-sized rover was launched on July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas V rocket and landed in Jezero Crater, a site chosen for its ancient river delta that may preserve evidence of past microbial life. The rover's main goals are to search for signs of ancient life, study the planet's geology and climate, and collect rock and regolith samples for possible return to Earth by a future mission. Perseverance also tests technologies intended to support later human exploration, including an experiment that successfully produced oxygen from the thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Perseverance carries seven primary scientific instruments, 19 cameras, and two microphones. It also deployed the experimental helicopter Ingenuity, which in April 2021 performed the first powered and controlled flight on another planet. Originally intended for up to five flights, Ingenuity completed dozens of sorties before being retired in 2024. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, Perseverance has an expected mission duration of over a decade. It has provided high-resolution panoramas, drilled and cached samples for later retrieval, and identified rocks which may have been habitable for ancient microbial life in Jezero Crater. In July 2024, it discovered the Cheyava Falls rock containing "possible biosignature." As of 27 August 2026, Perseverance has been active on Mars for 1962 sols (2016 total days; 5 years, 190 days) since its landing.
Mission Despite the high-profile success of the Curiosity rover landing in August 2012, NASA's Mars Exploration Program was in a state of uncertainty in the early 2010s. Budget cuts forced NASA to pull out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency which included a rover mission. By the summer of 2012, a program that had been launching a mission to Mars every two years suddenly found itself with no missions approved after 2013. In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine containing an influential set of recommendations made by the planetary science community, stated that the top priority of NASA's planetary exploration program in the decade between 2013 and 2022 should be to begin a NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return campaign, a four-mission project to cache, retrieve, launch, and safely return samples of the Martian surface to Earth. The report stated that NASA should invest in a sample-caching rover as the first step in this effort, with the goal of keeping costs under US$2.5 billion. After the success of the Curiosity rover and in response to the recommendations of the decadal survey, NASA announced its intent to launch a new Mars rover mission by 2020 at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2012. Though initially hesitant to commit to an ambitious sample-caching capability (and subsequent follow-on missions), a NASA-convened science definition team for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013 that the mission should "select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache."
Science objectives The Perseverance rover has four main science objectives that support the Mars Exploration Program's science goals:
Looking for habitability: identify past environments that were capable of supporting microbial life. Seeking biosignatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in specific rock types known to preserve signs over time. Caching samples: collect core rock and regolith (unconsolidated and loose "soil") samples and store them within the rover and on the Martian surface (as a backup) for delivery to a future sample return rocket. Preparing for humans: test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere. In the first science campaign, dubbed "Crater Floor", Perseverance performed an arching drive southward from its landing site to the Séítah unit to perform a "toe dip" into the unit to collect remote-sensing measurements of geologic targets. After that it returned to the Crater Floor Fractured Rough to collect the first core sample there. Passing by the Octavia E. Butler landing site concluded the first science campaign. The second campaign, "Fan Front", included several months of travel towards the "Three Forks" where Perseverance accessed geologic locations at the base of the ancient delta of Neretva river, as well as ascending the delta by driving up a valley wall to the northwest. The third and fourth campaigns were called "Upper Fan", and "Margin Unit", and the fifth campaign, "Northern Rim", in progress as of December 2024, is exploring "the northern part of the southwestern section of Jezero's rim" to study "rocks from deep down inside Mars that were thrown upward to form the crater rim" after the impact 3.9 billion years ago that formed Jezero Crater.
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