Uploaded August 2020 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
This script was made from NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Press Kit and uses direct quotes and bodies of text from the report.
Seven Things to Know About the Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission
The Perseverance rover, built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is loaded with scientific instruments, advanced computational capabilities for landing and other new systems. And launched to Mars on July 30th, 2020, Perseverance is also the largest, heaviest robotic Mars rover NASA has built. What drives its ambitious mission and what will it do at the Red Planet? Here are seven things you should know about Perseverance:
1. The Perseverance rover embodies the NASA — and the American — spirit of overcoming challenges.
Landing on another planet, searching for signs of ancient life, collecting samples and proving new technologies will also be tough. But, These challenges epitomize why NASA chose the name Perseverance from among the 28,000 essays submitted during the "Name the Rover" contest.
The months leading up to the launch in particular have required creative problem solving and teamwork during the coronavirus pandemic.
As Alex Mather wrote in his winning essay, "We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up."
2. Perseverance builds on the lessons of other Mars rovers.
Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Curiosity discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, hosted a lake billions of years ago and an environment that could have supported microbial life.
Perseverance aims to take the next step, seeking, as a primary goal, to answer one of the key questions of astrobiology: Are there potential signs of past microbial life, or biosignatures on Mars?
3. The rover will be landing in a place with high potential for finding signs of past microbial life.
Jezero Crater on Mars is a 28-mile-wide crater on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. The crater was a possible oasis in its distant past.
4. Perseverance will also be collecting important data about Mars' geology and climate. Mars orbiters have been collecting images and data from Jezero Crater from about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above, but finding signs of ancient life on the surface requires much closer inspection. It requires a rover like Perseverance.
5. Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars.
The verification of ancient life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof. Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission. Rather than pulverizing rock the way Curiosity's drill does, Perseverance's drill will cut intact rock cores that are about the size of a piece of chalk and will place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location.
A Mars sample return campaign is being planned by NASA and the European Space Agency because here on Earth we can investigate the samples with instruments too large and complex to send to Mars. Examining those samples on Earth will provide far more information about them than even the most sophisticated rover could provide.
6. Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will pave the way for future human missions to the Moon and Mars including:
- Terrain-Relative Navigation System
- Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE)
- Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA)
- The Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2)
- The Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC)
- Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL)
7. You will get to ride along.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission carries more cameras than any interplanetary mission in history. The Perseverance rover itself has 23 cameras that will deliver images of the landscape in breathtaking detail. As with previous Mars missions, the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission plans to make raw and processed images available on the mission's website.
In this spirit of bringing the public along, the Perseverance rover carries an anodized plate with the words "Explore as one" in Morse code and three silicon chips with the names of approximately 10.9 million people who signed up to ride along on Perseverance's journey to Mars.
You can also follow Perseverance's adventure on social media @NASAPersevere and @NASAMars.
Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more updates on mission to the Moon, Mars, and beyond!
Script: jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/launch
Website/Merch: spacebutmessier.com
Support Us on Patreon: patreon.com/spacebutmessier
This script was made from NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Press Kit and uses direct quotes and bodies of text from the report.
Seven Things to Know About the Mars 2020 Perseverance Mission
The Perseverance rover, built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is loaded with scientific instruments, advanced computational capabilities for landing and other new systems. And launched to Mars on July 30th, 2020, Perseverance is also the largest, heaviest robotic Mars rover NASA has built. What drives its ambitious mission and what will it do at the Red Planet? Here are seven things you should know about Perseverance:
1. The Perseverance rover embodies the NASA — and the American — spirit of overcoming challenges.
Landing on another planet, searching for signs of ancient life, collecting samples and proving new technologies will also be tough. But, These challenges epitomize why NASA chose the name Perseverance from among the 28,000 essays submitted during the "Name the Rover" contest.
The months leading up to the launch in particular have required creative problem solving and teamwork during the coronavirus pandemic.
As Alex Mather wrote in his winning essay, "We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up."
2. Perseverance builds on the lessons of other Mars rovers.
Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. Curiosity discovered that its landing site, Gale Crater, hosted a lake billions of years ago and an environment that could have supported microbial life.
Perseverance aims to take the next step, seeking, as a primary goal, to answer one of the key questions of astrobiology: Are there potential signs of past microbial life, or biosignatures on Mars?
3. The rover will be landing in a place with high potential for finding signs of past microbial life.
Jezero Crater on Mars is a 28-mile-wide crater on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. The crater was a possible oasis in its distant past.
4. Perseverance will also be collecting important data about Mars' geology and climate. Mars orbiters have been collecting images and data from Jezero Crater from about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above, but finding signs of ancient life on the surface requires much closer inspection. It requires a rover like Perseverance.
5. Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars.
The verification of ancient life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof. Perseverance is the first rover to bring a sample caching system to Mars that will package promising samples for return to Earth by a future mission. Rather than pulverizing rock the way Curiosity's drill does, Perseverance's drill will cut intact rock cores that are about the size of a piece of chalk and will place them in sample tubes that it will store until the rover reaches an appropriate drop-off location.
A Mars sample return campaign is being planned by NASA and the European Space Agency because here on Earth we can investigate the samples with instruments too large and complex to send to Mars. Examining those samples on Earth will provide far more information about them than even the most sophisticated rover could provide.
6. Perseverance carries instruments and technology that will pave the way for future human missions to the Moon and Mars including:
- Terrain-Relative Navigation System
- Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE)
- Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA)
- The Mars Science Laboratory Entry, Descent and Landing Instrumentation 2 (MEDLI2)
- The Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC)
- Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL)
7. You will get to ride along.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission carries more cameras than any interplanetary mission in history. The Perseverance rover itself has 23 cameras that will deliver images of the landscape in breathtaking detail. As with previous Mars missions, the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission plans to make raw and processed images available on the mission's website.
In this spirit of bringing the public along, the Perseverance rover carries an anodized plate with the words "Explore as one" in Morse code and three silicon chips with the names of approximately 10.9 million people who signed up to ride along on Perseverance's journey to Mars.
You can also follow Perseverance's adventure on social media @NASAPersevere and @NASAMars.
Thanks for watching and be sure to subscribe for more updates on mission to the Moon, Mars, and beyond!
Script: jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/mars_2020/launch
Website/Merch: spacebutmessier.com
Support Us on Patreon: patreon.com/spacebutmessier
