The countdown to the landing of Perseverance Rover on the red planet mars is over. The landing of the rover robot on mars was celebrated not only celebrated by scientists at the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California but by all scientists, students and everyone who watched the live coverage. The rover named Perseverance belongs to the NASA's 2020 Mars mission and was launched on July 30 2020 and landed on the Jazero crater on Mars today February 18, 2021. The main objective of the Perseverance rover mission is to seek for any signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth.

The objectives can be expanded as below:

• Looking for Habitability: Identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.

• Seeking Biosignatures: Seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time.
• Caching Samples: Collect core rock and "soil" samples and store them on the Martian surface.

• Preparing for Humans: Test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.

Picture of Perseverance, the rover. Image credit; NASA

To achieve these objectives, Perseverance is loaded with advanced technology such as that will extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, drill and coring of samples of the rocks and soil. The rover carries with her, a helicopter named Ingenuity of which its purpose is to test the technology of the first first powered flight on Mars. The helicopter will be tested to fly different distances and altitudes on Mars for the first 30 days. Upon arrival, Perseverance took pictures sent them back to earth.

First image taken by Perseverance, the rover. Image credit; NASA

Now that rover landed safely, we will be looking forward to the data and photographs she sends home before coming back to deliver some of the samples that will be analyzed for purpose of life support.