Perseverance and Mars Sample Return
A rover filling sealed tubes with Martian rock for a trip home that has yet to be arranged.
Key facts
- Agency
- NASA (United States), with the European Space Agency
- Type of mission
- Rover and sample caching
- Target
- Mars: Jezero crater
- Launched
- 30 July 2020
- Status
- Rover operating; return of the samples not funded
Perseverance landed on 18 February 2021 in Jezero crater, which held a lake about 3.5 billion years ago, with a river delta flowing into it. Its main job is to drill cores of the most promising rocks and seal them in metal tubes, each about the size of a marker pen, for return to Earth.
It has collected igneous rocks from the crater floor, mudstones and sandstones from the delta, and samples of the Martian air and soil. In 2023 it left ten tubes in a depot on the crater floor as a backup.
Cheyava Falls
In July 2024 the rover drilled a reddish mudstone nicknamed Cheyava Falls, covered in small pale spots with dark rims. On Earth, chemical patterns like these can be made by microbes. Scientists have called the rock the best candidate yet for a possible sign of past life on Mars, while stressing that non-living chemistry could also explain it. Only laboratories on Earth could settle the question.
Bringing the samples home
NASA and the European Space Agency planned a return campaign with a lander, a small rocket to launch the tubes into Mars orbit and an orbiter to carry them to Earth. Its cost rose steeply, and in early 2026 the United States left it unfunded. China plans its own Mars sample return, Tianwen-3, aimed for launch around 2028.
Why it matters to meteorites
For now, the roughly 400 known Martian meteorites are the only pieces of Mars in our laboratories. Their launch sites on Mars are unknown, so samples from a known spot, with known geology, would change how they are studied.
Key dates
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 30 July 2020 | Perseverance launched with the Ingenuity helicopter. |
| 18 February 2021 | Landed in Jezero crater. |
| 1 September 2021 | Sealed its first rock core. |
| January 2023 | Finished laying a depot of ten sample tubes on the crater floor. |
| July 2024 | Drilled the spotted rock Cheyava Falls. |
| January 2026 | The United States budget for 2026 left the Mars Sample Return campaign unfunded. |
See where this mission fits among all the others in the mission timeline.
Did you know?
The Ingenuity helicopter, carried by Perseverance, made 72 flights: the first powered flights on another planet.
Perseverance carries a small piece of the Martian meteorite Sayh al Uhaymir 008 as a calibration target for one of its instruments.