NASA’s Perseverance rover will seek signs of past life on Mars
NASA’s next rover is a connoisseur of Martian rocks. The main job of the Perseverance rover, set to launch between July 20 and August 11, is to pick out rocks that might preserve signs of past life and store the samples for a future mission back to Earth. “We’re giving a gift to the future,” says planetary scientist Adrian Brown, who works at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. Most of the rover’s seven sets of scientific instruments work in service of that goal, including zoomable cameras to pick out the best rocks from afar and lasers and spectrometers to identify a rock’s makeup. After the rover lands in February 2021, it’s capable of collecting and storing 20 samples within the first Martian year (about two Earth years). The NASA team plans to collect at least 30 samples over the whole mission, says planetary scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory...