NASA's new Mars rover is bristling with tech made to find signs of alien life

Deep down, our drive to explore Mars has always been about figuring out the story of life in our solar system. Or is life on Earth descended from Martian progenitors? NASA is now on the verge of launching its most ambitious effort ever to chip away at those questions, in the form of a high-tech rover called Perseverance and a scheme to return some of the samples it finds back home. If all goes well, Perseverance will lift off on July 30, and by February it will join a small fleet of Martian landers and rovers whose close-up study of Mars's surface has, in many ways, led to this moment. Each of the other three rovers NASA has launched in the 21st century have been concerned with investigating the potential for the Red Planet to harbor ancient or current biology.