Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet

A small chunk of Mars will be heading home when the US space agency launches its latest rover mission on Thursday. Nasa's Perseverance robot will carry with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, until now, has been lodged in the collection of London's Natural History Museum (NHM). The rock's known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument. It will give added confidence to any discoveries the robot might make. This will be particularly important if Perseverance stumbles across something that hints at the presence of past life on the planet - one of the mission's great quests.