NASA's Mars 2020 rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for ... [+] future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration.

NASAs most complex Mars rover so far will this week launch into space and begin its seven-month journey to the Red Planet.

Strapped to the belly of the Perseverance rover will be Ingenuity, a 1.8kg demonstration helicopter thats getting a lot of headlines.

However, whats being overlooked is Perseverances core mission, which is about as exciting as it could beits going to search for traces of ancient life on Mars.

Then, incredibly, its going to prepare samples to be brought back to Earth by astronauts or robotic probes in the 2030s.

Perseverance will thus become the first planetary mission to collect and cache Martian rock core and dust samples.

Its being played-down, but Perseverance could be instrumental in achieving something quite remarkablethe first evidence of the existence of life beyond Earth.

Perseverance sets a new bar for our ambitions at Mars, said Lori Glaze, planetary science director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. We will get closer than ever before to answering some of sciences longest-standing questions about the Red Planet, including whether life ever arose there.

Heres everything you need to know about the Perseverance rover, from where it will land to what it will do on Mars.

Illustration of NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover studying a Mars rock outcrop (not to scale).

Part of NASAs Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance will be the largest, heaviest, most sophisticatedrover ever sent to the Red Planet. Thats because verifying ancient microscopic life on Mars carries an enormous burden of proof.

Its mission will be to analyze rock and sediment samples to see if Mars may have had conditions for microorganisms to thrive. It will drill a few centimeters into Mars and take core samples, then put the most promising into containers. It will then leave them on the Martian surface to be later collected by a human mission in the early 2030s.

Perseverances SuperCam spectrometer will make a contactless geochemistry analysis of Martian rocks and soil by using a pulsed laser.

However, only laboratories back on Earth would be able to prove definitively that Perseverance has found evidence of past life on Mars.

Perseverance is scheduled to launch on Thursday, July 30, 2020 at 11:50 UTC/07:50 EDT/12:50 BST/13:50 CEST on board an Atlas V launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This map of the Red Planet shows Jezero Crater, where NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to land ... [+] in February 2021. Also included are the locations where all of NASA's other successful Mars missions touched down.

Perseverance is due to land on the red planet on February 18, 2021. It will land in a nearly four billion-year-old river delta in Mars 28 miles/45 kilometers-wide Jezero Crater.

Jezero Crater is on the western side of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator.

NASAs Perseverance rover is designed for a mission duration of one Mars year. Thats about two Earth years, though in practice its expected to last much longer than that.

Jezero Crater on Mars, the landing site for NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was taken by instruments on ... [+] NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Its selection as the landing site is no accident; this region contains some of the oldest and scientifically most interesting landscapes on Mars. Its thought likely that Jezero Crater was home to a lake as large as Lake Tahoe more than 3.5 billion years ago.

Theres no water there todayand nor is there much of an atmosphere on Marsbut its possible that ancient rivers flowing in and out of Jezero Crater, carrying organic molecules and possibly even microorganisms.The region is known to be home to clay, which could contain preserved traces of life.

The science team has had many discussions internally and externally about where the next Mars rover should go, said Ken Farley, the missions project scientist, based at Caltech in Pasadena. We ultimately chose Jezero Crater because it is such a promising location for finding organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life.

Does the ancient river delta contain preserved evidence of ancient microbial life? If Perseverance succeeds in its mission it will go down in historyand the hunt for more life beyond Earth can begin.

We stand at the threshold of another monumental moment in exploration: sample collection at Mars, said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine in June as the coronoavirus-hit preparations for Perseverance ramped-up. Future generations may well recognize the women and men of Perseverancenot only for what they will achieve 100 million miles from home, but for what they were able to accomplish on this world on the road to launch.

However, you spin it, theres no doubt that the launch of Perseverance could be a monumental moment in space exploration.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Was There Life On Mars? NASAs $2 Billion Bot Launches This Week On Unique Sample Return Mission - Forbes