The rover is also carrying a small helicopter, dubbed Ingenuity, that will be used to attempt the first controlled flight on another planet. 'But as we search for evidence of ancient microbes on an ancient alien world, it’s important to keep an open mind.' 'We expect the best places to look for biosignatures would be in Jezero’s lakebed or in shoreline sediments that could be encrusted with carbonate minerals, which are especially good at preserving certain kinds of fossilized life on Earth,' Ken Williford, deputy project scientist for the Perseverance mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. It's in this region that Perseverance will be able to inspect rocks as old as 3.6 billion years and search for biosignatures, or traces of organic matter, in the Martian sediments. There is evidence that an ancient river once flowed into Jezero, forming a delta billions of years ago that had all the right ingredients for life to arise. The Perseverance rover landed in an area of Mars known as the Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide basin that lies just north of the Martian equator. 'Every yard on the surface of Mars is a yard for Mars sample return.' 'Now the amazing science starts,' said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the NASA's science mission directorate.

Nasa mars rover its first sample