HUMANS HAVE won- dered if there's ever been life on Mars for as long as we've known it's a planet. We could soon have an answer. In February, NASA landed its Mars Perseverance rover, along with a companion helicopter, the intrepid Ingenuity, in an ancient river delta called Jezero Crater. The NASA mission, dubbed Mars2020, was designed to search for signs of ancient life and collect drilling samples to return to Earth for deeper analysis. "For the first time, we are actually going to bring back cores from Mars to Earth," says Vandi Verma, chief engineer of robotic operations for the mission. Along the way, Perseverance will also lay the groundwork for future human missions by studying environmental conditions, identifying resources like water and testing a method for making oxygen.
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