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NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will follow the proposed route to Jezero Crater's delta shown in this annotated animated GIF. The delta is one the most important locations the rover will visit as it seeks signs of ancient life on Mars.

This map includes data from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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 (broken rock and dust).

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

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover, and leads NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The University of Arizona, in Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colorado.

For more about Perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

nasa.gov/perseverance