NASA’s rover missions to Mars typically have been pedantic affairs, marked by slow traverses through unfamiliar terrain and serendipitous stops for extended scientific surveys. Not so with Perseverance, which is due to land in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18 (see page 52). Perseverance will be fighting the clock, with just two years to find and cache 30-40 samples that could resolve the ageold question about whether life exists beyond Earth. While the rover is equipped with a 130-lb., seven-member suite of scientific instruments for in situ exploration and analysis, uncontested evidence of indigenous Martian life likely will be found only by laboratories on Earth that will be examining the samples for decades to come.
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