NASA to Launch Mars Rover in 2020

This image taken by the Mastcam-Z camera aboard NASA's Perseverance rover on Sept. 4, 2021, confirmed that the rover had retained a rock core in the sample tube held in the drill at the end of its ...

NASA's Mars 2020 rover, now called Perseverance, undergoes processing at a payload servicing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 14, 2020.

NASA's Perseverance rover took this image of the Martian rock nicknamed "Rochette" on Aug. 27, 2021, shortly after it abraded a circular patch known as "Bellegarde."

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s fourth flight path is superimposed here atop terrain imaged by the HiRISE camera aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This map shows regions in and around Mars' Jezero Crater, the landing site of NASA's Perseverance rover. The green circle represents the rover's landing ellipse, or the area where it will be landin...

This image of the Perseverance Mars rover was taken at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on April 7, 2020, during a test of the vehicle's mass properties. 

This graphic depicts the environmental conditions at Jezero Crater from the day NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover landed through Sol 600. The black line shows a climatological model of airborne dust l...

Use this interactive virtual launch packet to learn more about the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover launch and download all the printable resources available for launch.

This image shows two possible routes (blue and purple) to the fan-shaped deposit of sediments known as a delta for NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars. The yellow line marks a notional traverse explo...

This illustration shows NASA’s Mars 2020 spacecraft carrying the Perseverance rover as it approaches Mars. Hundreds of critical events must execute perfectly and exactly on time for the rover to la...

Perseverance’s first cored-rock sample is visible inside this titanium sample collection tube in this image taken on Sept. 6, 2021.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter hovers over the Martian surface – the first instance of powered, controlled flight on another planet – as viewed by the Mastcam-Z imager aboard the Perseverance Mar...

Women working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pose for a photo in mission control in honor of Women in Science Day.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter can be seen on the belly of the Perseverance rover, ready to be dropped off at the helicopter’s deployment location. 

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 animation shows NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover collecting a rock sample from an outcrop the science team calls “Berea” using a coring bit on the end of its robotic arm. The images were taken b...

In this illustration, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover uses the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL). Located on the turret at the end of the rover's robotic arm, the X-ray spectromet...

This sequence of images – taken on May 22, 2021, by the navigation camera aboard NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter – depicts the last 29 seconds of the rotorcraft’s sixth flight.

This illustration shows the events that occur in the final minutes of the nearly seven-month journey that NASA’s Perseverance rover takes to Mars.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is seen here in 3D using images taken June 6, 2021, by the left and right Mastcam-Z cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

Members of NASA’s Mars Helicopter team prepare the flight model (vehicle going to Mars) for a test in the Space Simulator.

The actor Brad Pitt (right) shows off his "boarding pass" for Mars with Jennifer Trosper (left), the Mars 2020 project systems engineer, at JPL on Sept. 6, 2019. You can send your name to Mars aboa...

Meet one of the Martian samples that has been collected and is awaiting return to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign. As of late July 2023, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover has collecte...

This annotated image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows the journey NASA’s Perseverance rover has taken and will take in the future as it heads toward Jezero Crater’s delta on Mars...

Landing a spacecraft on Mars is one of the trickiest things we do. This 60-second video explains how it's done, and the three landing systems we use at the Red Planet.