Nearly three years ago, NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars as part of a decades-long effort to study if the now-barren planet ever hosted life.
Jezero Crater once harbored a big lake and a river delta. The car-sized Perseverance, equipped with sophisticated cameras and science instruments, has so far been spending its days studying its environs and scooping up a variety of intriguing, 3.5-billion-year-old Martian rocks and soil scattered on the crater floor. As planned, the rover has dropped 10 sample-filled tubes on the ground, where they await the arrival of a different robot which will ferry them back to Earth for more robust scrutiny in the 2030s.
