Perseverance lands on Mars

On 18 February 2021, in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory control room thinned out by pandemic protocols, masked engineers listened as the calls came in: parachute deploy, heat shield separation, radar lock. Seven minutes earlier, a spacecraft moving at about 20,000 kilometers per hour had hit the Martian atmosphere; by the time its radio signals reached Earth, the outcome was already decided. Then Swati Mohan's steady voice cut through: touchdown confirmed. The room erupted in fist bumps where hugs should have been.

Perseverance had just landed in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed considered too dangerous for any previous rover. It got there using terrain-relative navigation, photographing the ground during descent and matching the images against orbital maps to steer itself away from boulder fields, a first in planetary exploration. Its parachute carried a secret: 'Dare Mighty Things,' JPL's motto, woven into the canopy in binary code, along with the lab's GPS coordinates. And for the first time ever, cameras filmed the entire landing, giving humanity a real video of arrival on Mars.

The one-ton rover was built around a single audacious goal: find signs of ancient life and cache the evidence. It carries 43 sample tubes for a future Mars Sample Return campaign, microphones that recorded the first audio from another planet, and MOXIE, a toaster-sized device that on 20 April 2021 produced about five grams of oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide, the first resource ever extracted from another planet for human use. Bolted to its belly rode a small helicopter named Ingenuity.

From its landing site, named for science-fiction author Octavia E. Butler, Perseverance has spent the years since exploring Jezero's river delta and crater rim, sealing samples, including a 2024 rock called Cheyava Falls bearing potential biosignatures that may be the most tantalizing clue yet in the search for past Martian life.