At a Glance

Only about 50% of Mars landings have succeeded.The rover will search for signs of life.It will also collect rocks and sediment.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover made a perfect landing Thursday afternoon, the first step in its mission to search for signs that life may have once existed on Mars.

Only about 50% of previous Mars rover landings have succeeded, and this one came with extra challenges.

Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater, the most challenging terrain ever targeted for a Mars landing. The site was chosen because it's there that scientists believe an ancient river flowed into a lake and deposited sediments in a fan shape known as a delta, which could have that may have existed billions of years ago, according to a news release from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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One of the rover's first tasks was to photograph its new home and transmit the images back to Earth. Then, over the next few days, engineers will test its health and deploy equipment that will allow Perseverance to take more pictures.

The next month will be spent going through inspections, loading new flight software and preparing the , which is onboard Perseverance.

Besides searching for signs of ancient microbial life, the rover is also intended to help pave the way for future human exploration of the Red Planet. It will also be the first to collect Martian rock and sediment that will be returned to Earth.

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The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and will be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and sediment that would be collected and returned to Earth by future spacecraft.

The landing required hundreds of critical events to be executed perfectly and exactly on time.

"Perseverance is NASA’s most ambitious Mars rover mission yet, focused scientifically on finding out whether there was ever any life on Mars in the past," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C., said in the news release.

An illustration of NASA's Perseverance rover landing safely on Mars.

(NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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