The Perseverance Rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021. This interactive map tracks the path from its landing site at the northern end of Perseverance’s route, to its more recent locations.
NASA composed the map using a high-resolution color map for the initial exploration area of the rover, and a true-color Northeast Syrtis regional map. NASA created the high resolution map with images from the HiRISE camera on its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The regional map was made using the European Space Agency Mars Express High Resolution Stereo camera.
Each dot on Perseverance’s route represents the end point of a drive. The dots are labeled with the day, or sol, on Mars that the rover stopped. The rover spent its first twelve sols, from February 18 until March 2, at the Octavia E. Butler Landing Site. It made it to its first drill site on sol 157. An Earth year is equivalent to 352 sols on Mars.
Perseverance’s mission will hopefully last at least one Martian year, or about 687 Earth days. The rover was sent to Mars to look for signs of ancient life and collect rock samples to be returned to Earth.
“Perseverance’s mission, and the whole point of Mars 2020, is to collect samples, hermetically seal them up in these biologically isolated containers and prepare them for return to Earth,” Teddy Tzanetos, Ingenuity team lead, said. “Perseverance won’t be bringing them back. There’s going to be another mission that’s going to be responsible for collecting the samples, sending them up into orbit on Mars, capturing them in orbit around Mars, then shooting them back here to Earth.”
NASA also sent the Ingenuity helicopter to the planet. The helicopter was purely a technology demonstration for NASA. It’s currently completed 19 flights on Mars.
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