🤖🚀 Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet — a first for a NASA robot.
including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers.
Follow-up missions of orbiters, landers and rovers looked to see if Mars was even habitable to begin with. They focused on searching first for signs of ancient water — a key to life as we know it here on Earth. Rovers such as Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003, and Curiosity, launched in 2011, provided the groundwork for Perseverance to begin searching for ancient microbes in the rocks and dirt on Mars.
"Having samples returned is the only way that I, and I'm sure many other astrobiologists, would be truly convinced that we had found evidence for life on Mars," says Williams. While scientists wait for Perseverance to collect Martian samples, the mission is breaking ground in other ways. A tiny helicopter stowed away on the belly of the rover has completed 19 successful flights on the surface of Mars. What started as a proof of concept — that engineers could even design an aircraft that could fly in Mars' thin atmosphere — is now helping the rover spot new places to explore.
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