Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in February 2021, a basin chosen because a river once flowed into it and built a delta — the kind of sedimentary environment that on Earth preserves microscopic life most reliably. Its central purpose is not to detect life itself but to select and package rock cores for a future mission to bring home.
It has been doing exactly that, drilling finger-sized cores, sealing them in ultra-clean titanium tubes and either storing them aboard or laying them out in a depot on the surface as a backup cache. Whether they are ever collected depends on a Mars Sample Return programme whose cost and schedule have been repeatedly restructured — the samples are waiting, and the mission to fetch them is not yet built.
It also carried a device that made oxygen. MOXIE drew in carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere and split it electrochemically, producing breathable oxygen at a few grams an hour — small, but the first demonstration of manufacturing a consumable on another planet rather than carrying it. A full-scale version could generate the propellant for a crew's return journey.
Strapped beneath it was Ingenuity, a 1.8-kilogram helicopter built to prove powered flight was possible in an atmosphere one per cent as dense as Earth's. It was designed for five flights over a month. It made seventy-two over nearly three years, scouted routes for the rover, and flew until a rotor blade was damaged on landing in January 2024.
The mission also recorded the first sounds ever heard on another planet — the wind, the rover's own wheels grinding over rock, the crackle of its laser vaporising samples, and the thin whir of a helicopter, captured on a world where sound travels slower and carries poorly and nobody had ever listened before.
