Signs of Life on Mars? NASA's Perseverance Rover Begins the Hunt – NASA's Mars Exploration Program - NASA Mars Exploration

After testing a bristling array of instruments on its robotic arm, NASA’s latest Mars rover gets down to business: probing rocks and dust for evidence of past life.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has begun its search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.

“If life was there in Jezero Crater, the evidence of that life could be there,” said Allwood, a key member of the Perseverance “arm science” team.

That will be critical when the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover collects its first samples for eventual return to Earth.

They’ll be sealed in superclean metallic tubes on the Martian surface so that a future mission could collect them and send back to the home planet for further analysis.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.

The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet

Managed by the Mars Exploration Program and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate