Mar 1, 2021
After years of preliminary work by NASA and a traversed flight distance of 292 million miles, the Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars on 18 February 2021.
One of the main goals of the Mars mission is to search for signs of primeval microbial life. The rover will analyse the geology of the planet and the climate of earlier times, and will be the first mission to collect and store Martian rocks and regolith (broken rocks and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.