- [Woman] You know Mars
is the closest place
that we can reach with robotic exploration
that we think had a really good chance
of having ancient life.
- [Man] The Perseverance Rover will land
at a location called Jezero Crater.
Jezero Crater is a very interesting place.
It's a crater that once held a lake.
- [Woman] There are a lot of
craters on the surface of Mars
that could have once hosted ancient lakes.
But not ever crater that
we think had a lake,
actually preserves evidence
that that lake was there.
- [Man] It had an inflow channel
and it had an outflow channel.
That means it was filled,
the crater was filled with water.
- [Woman] In Jezero,
we have probably one of the
most beautifully preserved
delta deposits on Mars in that crater.
- [Man] This is a wonderful place to live
for micro organisms,
and it is also a wonderful
place for those micro-organisms
to be preserved so that
we can find them now
so many billions of years later.
- There is no other place
on Mars that has the unique
combination of the lake setting,
the beautifully preserved delta
and the diverse mineralogy
that we have in Jezero Crater.
So it's truly a special landing site.
- The major goal of the
Perseverance mission
is to investigate astrobiology
on Mars in particular,
to address the question of
whether life ever existed
on Mars.
The Perseverance Rover
starts with a design
that's very similar to Curiosity.
But we added to it a whole new
set of science instruments.
And these science
instruments were purposefully
selected to help us in the
search for bio signatures.
- We're gonna be taking
microphones with us.
For the first time,
we're gonna have that human
sense on another planet.
- Perseverance carries
with her a grand experiment
in space fairing technology.
A helicopter,
the name of which is now Ingenuity.
- One of the major upgrades
that Perseverance has
from Curiosity is that
it's able to self drive
for a distance of up
to 200 meters per day.
As the rover is driving,
it's literally building
the map of the road
it's driving on on Mars.
- Scientists for years have told us
that to really unlock the secrets of Mars,
we have to bring samples
from Mars back to Earth.
- [Man] So what Mars 2020 is going to do
is to drill samples,
put them in small tubes,
we're gonna seal it in
it's own individual tube.
We set them on the surface
to provide a target
for the second ignitions.
Which hopefully will get into development
in the next several years.
And could potentially get the
samples back to Earth by 2031.
- [Man] Perseverance is a
very, very profound first step
in both our understanding of our place
in the universe and a
stepping stone towards
human exploration on Mars.
