Mission Overview_ NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

NASA’s new Mars rover, Perseverance is in the final hours of its voyage to Mars, aiming for a landing in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. This mission is an exciting one, to search for direct evidence of past life on Mars. Perseverance will not only study samples of rock and soil in its onboard lab, it will also store some samples for later return to Earth, where they can be analyzed in even greater detail.

Perseverance physically resembles its predecessor, Curiosity, which is also still actively exploring Gale Crater after landing in 2012. Curiosity has focused on determining whether Gale Crater was habitable a few billion years ago, at least for Earth-type microbes. It has established that indeed it was, with evidence that Gale Crater used to be a lake, with fast-flowing streams that once emptied into it.

Analysis of the mudstones and other rock formations have found abundant clays, minerals and even organic molecules. The organics are not proof of past life in themselves however, and Curiosity wasn’t designed to look for life itself, but what is has found shows that Gale Crater lake would have been a good place for microbes to thrive, if they existed.