NASA’s rover lands on Mars to look for signs of ancient life

The NASA Perseverance rover landed on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 472 million kilometers.

The Perseverance, the most advanced car-sized robot ever sent to the Red Planet, was launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, United States.

Just minutes after the rover safely landed on Mars, the spacecraft sent back the first two images of the Red Planet.

The mission will look for signs of past microbial life and collect rock and soil samples for eventual return to Earth.

NASA said in a statement, “the size of a car, the 2,263-pound (1,026-kilogram) robotic geologist and astrobiologist will undergo several weeks of testing before it begins its two-year science investigation of Mars Jezero Crater.”

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“While the rover will investigate the rock and sediment of Jezero’s ancient lakebed and river delta to characterize the region’s geology and past climate, a fundamental part of its mission is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. To that end, the Mars Sample Return campaign, being planned by NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), will allow scientists on Earth to study samples collected by Perseverance to search for definitive signs of past life using instruments too large and complex to send to the Red Planet,” the statement read.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA stated that “Because of today’s (Thursday) exciting events, the first pristine samples from carefully documented locations on another planet are another step closer to being returned to Earth.”

“Perseverance is the first step in bringing back rock and regolith from Mars. We don’t know what these pristine samples from Mars will tell us. But what they could tell us is monumental – including that life might have once existed beyond Earth,” Zurbuchen said.