Mission Timeline

With the backshell that will help protect the Mars 2020 rover during its descent into the Martian atmosphere visible in the foreground, a technician on the project monitors the progress of Systems ...

This animation shows the progress of NASA's Perseverance Mars rover and its Ingenuity Mars Helicopter as they make the climb up Jezero Crater's delta toward ancient river deposits. 

This artwork is printed on one of the 10 samples that make up a suite of calibration targets for the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHER...

This image of the "South Séítah" region of Jezero Crater was taken by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 11th flight on Aug. 4.

An engineer working on NASA's Mars 2020 mission uses a solar intensity probe to measure and compare the amount of artificial sunlight that reaches different portions of the rover.

This is the third color image taken by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter. It was snapped on the helicopter’s second flight, April 22, 2021, from an altitude of about 17 feet (5.2 meters). Tracks made by ...

This sunset on Mars was captured by NASA's Perseverance Mars rover using its Mastcam-Z camera system on Nov. 9, 2021, the 257th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

In this illustration, NASA's Mars 2020 rover uses its drill to core a rock sample on Mars.

When our Perseverance Mars rover launches on July 30, it's set to be the first leg of a series of sample return missions in the search for evidence of life beyond Earth.

Exploration Timeline

This image of an area the Mars Perseverance rover team calls “Faillefeu” was captured by NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 13th flight at Mars on Sept. 4, 2021.

Perseverance’s backshell, supersonic parachute, and associated debris field is strewn across the Martian surface in this image captured by NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its 26th flight on...

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter extends vertically into place after being rotated outward from its horizontal position on the belly of the Perseverance rover on March 29, 2021.

NASA’s rovers are putting their gears in drive on Mars, making discoveries along the way.

This high-definition image was taken on Sept. 7, 2018, during the third and final test flight of the ASPIRE payload. It was the fastest inflation of this size parachute in history and created a pea...

Sending a rover to the Red Planet is more than just 3, 2, 1, liftoff! It takes 1,000s of people and years of hard work to get from Earth to Mars.

On Feb. 11, 2020, Mars 2020 Assembly, Test and Launch Operations Manager David Gruel watched as members of his team loaded NASA's next Mars rover onto an Air Force C-17 at March Air Reserve Base in...

Seasons change even on Mars and NASA's fleet of explorers are helping scientists learn more about the effects on the Red Planet.

Planning for NASA's 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new sci...

Composed of multiple precisely aligned images from the Context Camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this annotated mosaic depicts a possible route the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover could take ...

Stitched together from five images, this mosaic shows the calibration target for the SuperCam instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. The component images were taken by SuperCam’s remo...

Inside the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Backshell-Powered Descent Vehicle and Entry Vehicle assemblies are being prepared to be attached to th...

Since landing in February 2021, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has sent back hundreds of thousands of images of the Red Planet. After each communication downlink, images go directly to the Persever...

This nickel-alloy heat exchanger is among several that were 3D printed for the Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), one of the instruments aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars ro...

In this illustration of its descent to Mars, the spacecraft containing NASA’s Perseverance rover slows down using the drag generated by its motion in the Martian atmosphere. Hundreds of critical ev...