NASA's Perseverance Rover Landed on Mars

Members of NASA’s Perservenace rover team celebrate the successful landing of Perseverance on Mar’s surface.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed at Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18 as part of the agency’s Mars 2020 mission. Perseverance seeks to collect Martian data samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) in hopes of finding signs of ancient life.

NASA expects Perseverance’s mission to last 1 Martian year (686 days), but some team members speculate it will last much longer. Based on the design of NASA’s Curiosity rover launched in 2012, Perseverance is a nuclear-powered rover. It collects rock samples that a future mission will retrieve by deploying the first helicopter to visit another planet. 

NASA’s Mars 2020 mission rover will collect data samples for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Ingenuity, the small drone attached to the Perseverance rover, has two primary goals. First, it acts as a transporting device for data samples the Perseverance rover collects. Second, and more significantly, it demonstrates whether flight on Mars is possible.

This animation depicts the deployment of Perseverance’s parachute, with the coded message hidden in the patches of color.

The Perseverance rover landing video captured the deployment of the rover’s parachute, which had an encoded message using reddish-orange and white patches of fabric. Allen Chen, the head engineer of the landing system, has hinted toward a secret message hidden in the Perseverance rover landing. Shortly after, Maxence Abela, a computer science student in Paris, France, decoded the parachute, revealing the message “Dare Mighty Things”—NASA’s motto—and the GPS coordinates of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.