Mission Timeline

The Mars 2020 rover is offloaded from a C-17 aircraft at the Launch and Landing Facility, formerly known as the Shuttle Landing Facility, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 12, 2020. 

A crane lifts the rocket-powered descent stage away from NASA's Mars 2020 rover after technicians tested the pyrotechnic charges that separate the two spacecraft.

An animated flyover of the Martian surface explains why Mars’ Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide ancient lake-delta system, is the best place for Mars 2020 to find and collect promising samples for a po...

Members of JPL's assembly, test and launch operations team for NASA's Perseverance mission show appreciation for their newly named rover. The image was taken on March 4, 2020, at a payload processi...

Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new sci...

JPL mechanical technician Eddie Castro uses a paint meter to measure the paint thickness on the Mars 2020 rover chassis.

NASA's Mars 2020 rover looks virtually the same as Curiosity, but there are a number of differences.

So, you want to study Mars with a lander or rover - but where exactly do you send it? Learn how scientists and engineers tackle this question in this 60-second video from NASA's Jet Propulsion Labo...

This illustration depicts the mechanism and conceptual research targets for an instrument named Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals, or SHERLOC.

NASA's Mars 2020 spacecraft undergoes examination prior to an acoustic test in the Environmental Test Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

(Left) Apollo 12 astronaut Charles “Pete” Conrad Jr. stands beside NASA's Surveyor 3 spacecraft; the lunar module Intrepid can be seen in the distance. (Right) Mars 2020 rover, seen here in an arti...

Antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network provide two-way communications with spacecraft exploring the planets.

Close-up of a slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. This slice will likely be used here on Earth for testing a laser instrument for NASA's Mars 2020 rover; a separate slic...

NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen and Lori Glaze congratulate Alexander Mather during a March 5, 2020, celebration at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia. The seventh grader submitted the winni...

In the Australian Outback, scientists from NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 mission and their counterparts from the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission visited the oldest convincing evidence for life o...

Scientists with NASA's Mars 2020 mission and the European-Russian ExoMars mission traveled to the Australian Outback to hone their research techniques before their missions launch to the Red Planet...

​ This Mars map depicts the final four locations under consideration for the landing site of Mars 2020. 

This is an artist's concept of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft during its cruise phase between launch and final approach to Mars.

On June 21, 2019, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory install the main robotic arm on the Mars 2020 rover.

Download a PDF of the Mars 2020 Helicopter Fact Sheet.

High Bay 1 looks much as it does today in this photo of NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers being tested on Feb. 10, 2003. 

This diagram, superimposed on a photo of Martian landscape, illustrates a concept called "adaptive caching," which is in development for NASA's 2020 Mars rover mission.

Engineers prepare the Mars 2020 spacecraft for a thermal vacuum (TVAC) test in the Space Simulator Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

This high-definition image was taken on Sept. 7, 2018, during the third and final test flight of the ASPIRE payload. It was the fastest inflation of this size parachute in history and created a pea...

Seventh-grader Alexander Mather of Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, submitted the winning entry in the agency's "Name the Rover" essay contest, making the case to name the Mars 20...