NASA's Mars Perseverance Mission on Track for Ambitious Landing

"It will attempt to answer an age-old question that has eluded humanity for generations: whether life has ever existed elsewhere beyond our own planet," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the space agency's science mission directorate in Washington, said of the Perseverance mission. Bristling with sensors, cameras, microphones and a robotic arm, the one-ton, SUV-size Perseverance rover is designed to look for rock or soil specimens that might harbor evidence of ancient life and pack what it finds into small tubes, to be cached for retrieval by future missions and brought back to Earth for analysis. NASA and the European Space Agency are discussing several mission scenarios that might return these samples by 2031, NASA officials said. If all goes well, NASA's Perseverance rover will join four previous robotic vehicles that pioneered exploration of the red planet. As the first rover on Mars, Sojourner was small and simple.