On July 30 at 11:50 am UTC, the final Mars mission for this Martian launch window took off aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to arrive at the red planet on February 18, 2021. 

Perseverance has four goals: determine whether life ever existed, characterize the climate, characterize the geology, and prepare for human exploration. On Mars.

According to NASA, Perseverance will land in Jezero Crater, a “28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) impact basin with an intriguing ancient river delta as well as steep cliffsides, sand dunes, boulders fields, and smaller impact craters.” 

The delta is of particular interest because it’s a target-rich environment for Percy’s on-board instruments. There are “at least five different kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life.” Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) will “[aim] a tiny but powerful X-ray beam at rocks” that will make the rocks glow depending on their elemental chemistry. Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) will shoot an ultraviolet laser at samples to look for organic molecules — these are generally any molecules that have carbon-hydrogen bonds.

What makes Perseverance a really Big Deal is that it’s “the first Mars rover designed to collect samples that could one day be returned to Earth.” A core sample will be collected using a drill on the end of Percy’s robotic arm. Once the sample is safely placed inside the bit carousel, other robotic bits on the rover will go through a series of maneuvers to place that sample inside the rover itself. The idea is that a future mission will retrieve the samples and send them back to Earth for further analysis.

More Information

NASA press release 

NASA JPL press kit