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Perseverance Mars rover looks out at an expanse of boulders on the landscape in front of a location nicknamed “Santa Cruz” on Feb. 16, 2022, the 353rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This panorama is made up 24 individual images from the rover’s Mastcam-Z camera system stitched together after they were sent back from Mars. 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. The Mastcam-Z investigation is led and operated by Arizona State University in Tempe, working in collaboration with Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, California, on the design, fabrication, testing, and operation of the cameras, and in collaboration with the Neils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen on the design, fabrication, and testing of the calibration targets. The CGI Snake composition (artist: Chris Zabriskie) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Source: Artist:
