NASA to Launch Mars Rover in 2020

This map of Mars shows the landing site for NASA’s Perseverance rover in relation to those of previous successful Mars missions. 

This map shows where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover dropped each of its 10 samples – one half of every pair taken so far – so that a future mission could pick them up. After five weeks of work, the...

What does NASA do to get a rover ready for Mars? JPL’s paint shop does a thousand different paint jobs a year. And while every piece of spacecraft that comes through the shop is important, one head...

This image shows the 142 images that make up Mastcam-Z’s first 360-degree panorama. Mastcam-Z is a pair of zoomable cameras on the mast, or “head,” of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

This animated GIF shows a NASA Wallops Flight Facility C-130 soon after landing Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 11, 2020. The cargo plane was carrying nearly 5,000 pounds (2,270 kilograms) o...

This annotated image indicates the locations of NASA’s Perseverance rover (lower right), as well as the “Kodiak” butte (lower left) and several prominent steep banks known as escarpments, or scarps...

This artist's concept video shows NASA's Mars 2020 rover raising its head (its mast) and reaching out its robotic arm.

At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover was prepared for encapsulation in the United Launch Alliance Atlas V payload fairing on June 18, 2020. 

Perseverance snapped this view of a hill called “Santa Cruz” on April 29, 2021. About 20 inches (50 centimeters) across on average, the boulders in the foreground are among the type of rocks the ro...

Mission Timeline

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is seen here in 3D using images taken June 6, 2021, by the left and right Mastcam-Z cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

This image of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument of the Perseverance rover on June 15, 2021, the 114th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The location, "Airfie...

Robots are paving the way for future human missions to Mars.

Video from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captures a closeup view of the 13th flight of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, on Sept. 4, 2021.

This illustration of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover indicates the location of its two microphones.

This image taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover on Aug. 6, shows that sample collection tube No. 233 is empty. It is one of the pieces of data sent to Earth by Perseverance showing that the rover did...

Parts of Perseverance are visible beside an area outlined in AI4Mars. 

Planetary protection engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California swab engineering models of the the tubes that will store Martian rock and sediment samples as part of NASA’...

JPL’s Abigail Allwood, principal investigator of the PIXL instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, examines rocks in Greenland.

This is the first image NASA’s Perseverance rover sent back after touching down on Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. The view, from one of Perseverance’s Hazard Cameras, is partially obscured by a dust cover.

Members of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission were jubilant on Feb. 18, 2021, after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars. They are in Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Labo...

NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission will collect the first samples from another planet (the red one) for return to Earth by subsequent missions.

The nose cone containing the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover sits atop a motorized payload transporter at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 7, 2020.

Engineers working with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover set up this test area at JPL to practice drilling into crumbly rocks using a duplicate of the rover’s rock-coring drill. Perseverance’s first s...

This image shows major components of NASA's Mars 2020 mission in the High Bay 1 clean room in JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility.