Members of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission celebrate on Feb. 18, 2021, after learning the spacecraft has touched down on Mars. They are in the Entry, Descent and Landing War Room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and manages operations of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover for NASA.

For more information about the mission, go to https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.