The Perseverance rover has touched down on the Red Planet, and now we’re counting down the top 10 tremendous marvels that make this mission a true milestone in space exploration. Weighing a metric ton, costing over $2 billion, and carrying a suite of cutting‑edge instruments, Perseverance is set to hunt for ancient life, test new technologies, and pave the way for humans to set foot on Mars.
Top 10 Tremendous Highlights
10 Seven Minutes in Hell
Fortunately for the Perseverance crew, the most nerve‑wracking segment of the journey is already behind them. The difficulty comes in two parts: the sheer challenge of landing a heavyweight rover on an alien world, and the fact that mission controllers on Earth are completely powerless to intervene during those critical moments.
As with every prior Mars mission, the descent from the thin Martian atmosphere to the surface takes roughly seven minutes, while the spacecraft barrels through the sky at about 12,000 mph. Add to that the 11‑minute lag for radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars, and the entire control team can only watch, wait, and hope.
NASA labels this interval the “seven minutes of terror,” a period where the combination of extreme risk and human helplessness has everyone in the flight‑control room biting their nails, wondering whether years of engineering will end in a spectacular crash.
Perseverance faced two extra hurdles. First, at a full metric ton it became the heaviest rover ever attempted on Mars. Second, its chosen landing spot—Jezero Crater—while promising for life‑search, is riddled with boulders and steep cliffs, making it a high‑risk, high‑reward locale.
Luckily, the rover survived thanks to two brand‑new technologies. A range‑trigger system lets the vehicle decide the precise moment to unleash its 70‑foot parachute, while Terrain‑Relative Navigation provides eyes and a map, guiding a safe touchdown. Allen Chen, head of the Entry, Descent and Landing team, says Jezero would have been impossible without those advances.
9 Looking for Life in All the Right Places
As NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine explained before launch, Perseverance marks “the first time in history we’re going to Mars with an explicit mission to find life on another world—ancient life on Mars.” The landing site was deliberately chosen to maximize the chance of discovering biosignatures.
Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater, a 28‑mile‑wide basin that scientists believe once held a lake roughly the size of Lake Tahoe. A massive inlet channel suggests water once flowed freely in and out, and the crater’s depth indicates the ancient lake could have been hundreds of feet deep.
These ancient water flows created a broad delta of sediment deposits on the crater floor. If microbes ever lived on Mars, the delta’s layered deposits are prime real estate, mirroring Earth’s earliest life‑bearing environments from about 3.5 billion years ago when Mars still had abundant liquid water.
The rover’s chief goal is to sniff out telltale biosignatures—chemical fingerprints that could reveal past life—hidden within those layered sediments. Success would answer the profound question of whether Earth is the sole cradle of life in our solar system.
8 Space Helicopter?
Yes, a helicopter—albeit a tiny, four‑pound flying camera named Ingenuity—joined Perseverance on its 300‑million‑mile odyssey. Its mission is simple yet revolutionary: prove that powered flight is possible in Mars’s ultra‑thin atmosphere.
Because the Martian air is less than 1 % as dense as Earth’s, Ingenuity’s four carbon‑fiber blades spin at a blistering 2,400 rpm—far faster than any Earth‑based rotorcraft—to generate enough lift. The frigid night temperatures, plunging to –90 °C, also test the copter’s components to their limits.
Real‑time control is impossible; signals take minutes to travel between Earth and Mars. Consequently, Ingenuity receives pre‑programmed commands, takes off on its own, and autonomously recharges its batteries via a solar panel, a task Perseverance doesn’t need thanks to its nuclear power source.
Beyond being the first aircraft to fly on another planet, Ingenuity serves as a scout. Its high‑resolution, downward‑looking camera surveys terrain—such as the ground over a hill—to pinpoint potential points of interest for the slow‑moving Perseverance to investigate.
7 Armed and Ready
Perseverance’s most eye‑catching feature is its seven‑foot‑long robotic arm, engineered to mimic a human limb for intuitive remote operation. The arm boasts a shoulder, elbow, rotating wrist, and a versatile gripper that functions much like a human hand.
This dexterous appendage can reach the majority of the rover’s scientific payload, allowing it to deploy “hand tools” that extract core samples, capture microscopic images, and analyze the elemental and mineral composition of Martian rocks and soil.
The rotary‑percussive drill, a centerpiece of the arm, uses a spinning motion to bore into the surface, collecting pristine samples. A suite of drill bits—some designed to scrape away weathered layers and expose fresh material—feed the collected cores directly into sealed tubes via the arm’s turret‑like hand.
Another arm‑mounted instrument, PIXL, scans textures and chemistry at microscopic scales, hunting for subtle signs of ancient life. By scrutinizing candidate rocks, PIXL helps scientists prioritize the most promising specimens for deeper analysis.
6 Listen Up
Perseverance carries a pair of ultra‑sensitive microphones—the first ever sent to another planet—granting NASA an unprecedented ability to listen to the Martian environment. The microphones will capture the howling of Martian winds, which are notoriously strong and have previously doomed rovers by coating solar panels with dust.
The rover will also record its own wheel crunches as it traverses the terrain. Those sounds not only confirm the rover’s mechanical health but may also offer clues about the composition of the soil beneath each tread.
There’s even a chance that Perseverance’s touchdown was felt by another spacecraft. The InSight lander, perched 3,500 km away, houses a seismometer that detects marsquakes. Scientists suspect the seismic waves generated by Perseverance’s landing could have been recorded, marking the first detection of a known impact on another world.
If confirmed, this seismic “hello” would provide a new window into Mars’s interior, as such waves help map subsurface geological structures. Unfortunately, InSight’s capabilities were hampered by dust‑covered solar panels just before Perseverance arrived, so the data remains to be fully analyzed.
5 Nuclear Battery
To avoid the fate of its solar‑panel‑reliant predecessor, which was crippled by a dust storm, Perseverance is powered by a Multi‑Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG)—essentially a nuclear battery.
The 99‑pound MMRTG converts heat released by the natural decay of over ten pounds of plutonium‑238 into a steady stream of electricity, delivering roughly 110 watts at mission start and only slowly losing output over the years.
This generator also charges two lithium‑ion batteries that supply power during peak‑demand activities, such as the high‑energy drilling and sample‑handling operations that can draw up to 900 watts.
Beyond electricity, the MMRTG’s waste heat keeps Perseverance’s instruments and systems at workable temperatures, providing a reliable energy source that isn’t vulnerable to Martian dust or seasonal darkness.
4 The Next Step Toward Manned Missions: Oxygen Creation
While hunting for ancient microbes, Perseverance also tackles a critical challenge for future human explorers: producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. This ambitious experiment, dubbed MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In‑Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), demonstrates how astronauts might generate breathable air and rocket propellant on Mars.
MOXIE works like a tiny tree: it “inhales” carbon‑dioxide—making up about 96 % of the Martian air—and “exhales” oxygen through a solid‑oxide electrolysis process. The device, weighing 37 pounds and roughly the size of a car battery, runs intermittent hour‑long sessions, aiming to produce roughly 10 grams of oxygen per run.
Although modest, this output is a proof‑of‑concept. A human mission would need 33–50 tons of oxygen to launch off the planet—comparable to the mass of a space shuttle—so any system capable of delivering a meaningful fraction must be far larger, perhaps 100 times the size of MOXIE.
3 What’s Old Is New
Ironically, some of Perseverance’s most sophisticated systems rely on technology that dates back to the early 1990s. The rover’s brain is a radiation‑hardened IBM PowerPC microprocessor known as the RAD750, originally designed by Motorola and IBM and comparable in raw power to a 1992 Pentium I.
The RAD750 handles the rover’s entire avionics suite, from navigation to instrument control. Its longevity stems from being battle‑tested: it has survived hundreds of missions in space, making it a trusted workhorse where reliability outweighs raw speed.
Why not use a newer chip? Because packing more transistors makes electronics more vulnerable to cosmic radiation. As JPL mobility flight systems engineer Richard Rieber explains, “The closer you pack your transistors, the more susceptible to radiation you get. With space hardware, you need high reliability, and the RAD750 has had a couple of hundred missions in space.”
In addition to the RAD750, Perseverance employs field‑programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to manage the drivetrain, wheels, suspension, and cameras. One such FPGA, a Virtex‑5, played a crucial role during the atmospheric entry, descent, and landing phase. Now that the rover is on the ground, these FPGA modules will be re‑programmed from Earth to handle visual processing for navigation.
2 Sending Mementos to Mars
For decades NASA has loved tacking on fun extras to its spacecraft, and Perseverance is no exception. The rover carries three microchips etched with nearly 11 million names as part of the “Send Your Name To Mars” campaign—a nine‑fold increase over Curiosity’s 1.2 million‑name payload.
In tribute to the frontline healthcare workers who battled the COVID‑19 pandemic, Perseverance also includes a special dedication, launched just months after the crisis began.
Beyond sentimental gestures, the rover boasts functional curiosities. Its Mastcam‑Z camera, a zoomable panoramic system, bears a greeting to any potential extraterrestrials: “Are we alone? We came here to look for signs of life, and to collect samples of Mars for study on Earth. To those who follow, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”
Perhaps the coolest token is a coin forged from astronaut helmet‑visor material, embedded in the calibration target for the SHERLOC instrument. The coin bears the address of Sherlock Holmes’s famous residence—221 B Baker Street—adding a touch of geek‑culture to the scientific payload.
1 A Very Special Delivery
The grand finale of Perseverance’s mission is a daring plan to bring Martian soil back to Earth—a venture known as Mars Sample Return. This ambitious effort spans three separate missions over the next decade.
Like its predecessor Curiosity, Perseverance houses an on‑board laboratory, but it goes further with a sophisticated sampling system that drills, seals, and stores rock and soil cores for a future trip home.
During the next two years, the rover will drill cylindrical cores deep into the Martian surface, each sample representing a distinct slice of the planet’s geological history—much like tree rings on Earth.
After gathering roughly 40 sealed samples, Perseverance will set them down and roll away, awaiting a future mission. A joint NASA‑ESA Sample Retriever Lander will later rendezvous with the rover, capture the sealed tubes, and launch them into space using a rocket—marking the first-ever launch from another planet.
The ascent vehicle will deposit the basketball‑sized payload into Mars orbit, where an Earth Return Orbiter—comparable in size to a commercial airliner—will snatch the container and ferry it back to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis.
If any ancient Martian microbes left their imprint, this sample return could finally answer the age‑old question of whether life ever existed beyond our world, cementing the mission as the most extraordinary achievement in human space exploration to date.