BULLETIN

Perseverance lands on Mars

The rover will collect rocks that will one day be returned to Earth

At 20:55pm UT on 18 February NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars. As well as being the most advanced robotic geologist and astrobiologist ever created, it marks the first stage of one of NASA’s most ambitious plans ever. Perseverance will create caches of Mars rock that a future mission, currently being planned by both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), will collect and return to Earth.

“What they could tell us is monumental – including that life might have once existed beyond Earth,” says Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA.

The rover used the same sky crane landing system that was developed for the Curiosity rover, touching down just north of Mars’s equator in the Jezero crater. The region is home to an ancient river deltaThe probe appears to be in working order and will spend the next few weeks charging up its batteries, before being dropped onto the surface this spring.