The mission’s first two samples of regolith – broken rock and dust – could help scientists better understand the Red Planet and engineers prepare for future missions there. NASA’s Perseverance rover snagged two new samples from the Martian surface on Dec. 2 and 6. But unlike the 15 rock cores collected to date, these newest samples came from a pile ...

NASA’s Perseverance rover is well into its second science campaign, collecting rock-core samples from features within an area long considered by scientists to be a top prospect for finding signs of ancient microbial life on Mars. The rover has collected four samples from an ancient river delta in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater since July 7, bringing the total count of ...

Key takeaways: Roving the Red Planet. Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet’s geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life.​​​​​​ What lies beneath. The rover’s subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA’s David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater. Probing the past. The variations could indicate ...