Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in 2021 to search for ancient signs of life and cache rock samples.
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission placed Perseverance on the Martian surface on February 18, 2021. Jezero crater was selected because orbital observations showed evidence of an ancient river delta and a lake basin. Such environments could have preserved chemical or mineral traces of past microbial activity.
The rover carries a drill and stores selected rock cores in sealed tubes. Its sample-caching work is intended to support a possible future Mars Sample Return effort, although returning the tubes to Earth requires later missions and has involved changing plans. Perseverance also carries instruments including Mastcam-Z, SuperCam, and SHERLOC.
The mission included Ingenuity, a small helicopter that achieved the first powered, controlled flight on another planet in April 2021. Perseverance and Ingenuity therefore combined geological exploration on the ground with aerial scouting. The rover’s mission is distinct from Curiosity’s: both study habitability, but Perseverance focuses especially on caching samples for future analysis.