English: Provided by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter, this overhead image captures a portion of Mars’ Jezero Crater. The yellow dot on lower right indicates the location of NASA’s Perseverance rover. The remnant of Jezero Crater’s rover delta the science team refers to as "Kodiak" is to the lower left. Long, steep slopes, called scarps, along the delta are on the upper left, labeled A through D.

The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover for NASA.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/USGS