Perseverance is a car-sized rover exploring Jezero Crater, the site of a river delta that flowed into a lake billions of years ago. It landed in February 2021 using the sky-crane maneuver and carried Ingenuity, the small helicopter that became the first aircraft to fly on another planet.
Its core job is astrobiology: examining rocks that may preserve signatures of ancient microbial life, and sealing the most promising samples in titanium tubes. Those cached samples are intended for a future Mars Sample Return campaign, which would be the first round trip of material from Mars.
If life ever existed on Mars, Jezero's lakebed rocks are among the most likely places its traces survive. Perseverance is the first mission built to collect evidence rigorous enough to settle the question in Earth laboratories rather than from orbit or a rover camera.
Key Facts
- Landed
- February 18, 2021, Jezero Crater
- Mission
- Astrobiology and sample caching
- Size
- About 1 ton, car-sized, nuclear powered
- Companion
- Ingenuity helicopter (72 flights, 2021-2024)
- Samples
- Titanium tubes cached for future return to Earth
Timeline
July 2020
Launch from Cape Canaveral
February 2021
Sky-crane landing in Jezero Crater
April 2021
Ingenuity makes the first powered flight on another planet
September 2021
First rock sample sealed
Next up
Continued delta exploration; sample return architecture under study
Latest Perseverance News
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Facts last reviewed 2026-07-11. Official mission page: nasa.gov