Made for Mars: the impressive engineering of Perseverance

Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is the car-sized Mars rover designed to explore Jezero crater on the red planet as part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on July 30, 2020, with confirmation that it had landed on Mars received on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance carries seven new scientific instruments and has a total of 19 cameras and two microphones. It is also equipped with the mini-helicopter Ingenuity, an experimental aircraft that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet.

The Perseverance rover’s four science objectives during its mission are:

1. Looking for habitability: identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.
2. Seeking biosignatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs over time.
3. Caching samples: collect core rock and regolith (“soil”) samples and store them on the Martian surface.
4. Preparing for humans: test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.

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