Now performing the role of a location scout on Mars, the Perseverance rover has a new task.
Searching for potential landing sites for the Mars Sample Return Campaign, the robotic explorer has been looking for flat areas around Jezero Crater.
Over the course of the next ten years, this ambitious project a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency will rely on a number of missions to retrieve materials obtained by Perseverance and return them to Earth.
The first Martian samples to be brought back to Earth will be these specimens.
Perseverance is gathering rocks and soil as it explores the location of a long-gone lake that existed billions of years ago.
This material is intriguing because it might have traces of extinct microscopic organisms that would show whether life has ever existed in the past on Mars.
