Mission Overview: NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover

– You know Mars
is the closest placethat we can reach with robotic explorationthat we think had a really good chanceof having ancient life. – The Perseverance Rover will landat a location called Jezero Crater. Jezero Crater is a very interesting place. It’s a crater that once held a lake. – There are a lot of
craters on the surface of Marsthat could have once hosted ancient lakes. But not ever crater that
we think had a lake,actually preserves evidence
that that lake was there. – It had an inflow channeland it had an outflow channel. That means it was filled,the crater was filled with water. – In Jezero,we have probably one of the
most beautifully preserveddelta deposits on Mars in that crater. – This is a wonderful place to livefor micro organisms,and it is also a wonderful
place for those micro-organismsto be preserved so that
we can find them nowso many billions of years later. – There is no other place
on Mars that has the uniquecombination of the lake setting,the beautifully preserved deltaand the diverse mineralogy
that we have in Jezero Crater. So it’s truly a special landing site. – The major goal of the
Perseverance missionis to investigate astrobiology
on Mars in particular,to address the question of
whether life ever existedon Mars. The Perseverance Rover
starts with a designthat’s very similar to Curiosity. But we added to it a whole new
set of science instruments. And these science
instruments were purposefullyselected to help us in the
search for bio signatures. – We’re gonna be taking
microphones with us. For the first time,we’re gonna have that human
sense on another planet. – Perseverance carries
with her a grand experimentin space fairing technology. A helicopter,the name of which is now Ingenuity. – One of the major upgrades
that Perseverance hasfrom Curiosity is that
it’s able to self drivefor a distance of up
to 200 meters per day. As the rover is driving,it’s literally building
the map of the roadit’s driving on on Mars. – Scientists for years have told usthat to really unlock the secrets of Mars,we have to bring samples
from Mars back to Earth. – So what Mars 2020 is going to dois to drill samples,put them in small tubes,we’re gonna seal it in
it’s own individual tube. We set them on the surface
to provide a targetfor the second ignitions. Which hopefully will get into developmentin the next several years. And could potentially get the
samples back to Earth by 2031. – Perseverance is a
very, very profound first stepin both our understanding of our placein the universe and a
stepping stone towardshuman exploration on Mars.