What you need to know about the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission

Perseverance will land on the Red Planet and search for signs of ancient microbial life, characterise the planet's geology and climate, and collect rock and sediment samples.

NASA’s new rover is the latest in a long line of Mars rovers that had increasingly complex missions over the years that culminated in the Perseverance’s mission to gauge human survival on Mars.

To ensure that Perseverance takes the path of least resistance to finding microbial life, the rover will land in a location that has the highest possibility of housing life - the Jezero Crater - where a river used to run billions of years ago.

Unlike NASA’s previous rovers, however, Perseverance is not a one-way mission; the robot will collect samples and package them such that they can be retrieved by a future mission to Mars.