![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/cu06-illustration-16x9-v01.png\")
<\/p>\n
[Music: Curiosity by SYSTEM Sounds]\u00a0<\/p>\n
HOST JACOB PINTER: You\u2019re listening to NASA\u2019s Curious Universe. I\u2019m your host, Jacob Pinter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
February 18, 2021 was a nail-biter of a day at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. More than 140 million miles away, a capsule was hurtling through the atmosphere of another planet.\u00a0Packed inside was a nuclear-powered, car-sized, six-wheeled rover called Perseverance.<\/p>\n
![\"In](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pia26344-perseverance-selfie-at-cheyava.gif\")
NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars rover took this selfie on September 10, 2021, the 198th Martian day, or sol, of its mission.<\/p>\n
Thousands of NASA engineers had spent years designing and building this thing<\/a>. The spacecraft had to withstand the long journey to the Martian surface, and then the rover inside had to survive the harsh environment there. Katie Stack Morgan<\/a> is the project scientist for the Perseverance Mars rover. She was one of the folks doing the nail-biting. \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE STACK MORGAN: I was watching the landing from my living room in my kitchen, and we were actually online with our science team because we weren\u2019t allowed to co-locate because this was during Covid. And so I was watching it on the TV, I was watching my computer, looking at our team members, and my family was around me.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Katie had watched a Mars landing before for the Curiosity rover<\/a>, which touched down in 2012. That one felt different. \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I was a happy, go-lucky grad student back then. I was just in it for the ride, and I was enjoying the, you know, all of the fanfare surrounding a rover landing.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: This time, she was one of the scientists in charge of all the research this rover would do on Mars for years to come. And for that to happen, it first had to land safely. \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I very much felt like my career was dependent on the successful landing. You know, I had kids now, my family was depending on this rover to land, and so the stakes felt much higher.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Secretive Marimba by Nicolas Montazaud]\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: This phase of a Mars mission is called entry descent and landing<\/a>, or EDL.\u00a0But it has another name: the seven minutes of terror. That\u2019s because, in the seven minutes it takes to reach the planet\u2019s surface from orbit, a lot has to go just right. And with the time delay between Earth and Mars, you can\u2019t control what\u2019s happening in real time.\u00a0\u00a0All you can do is watch and wait and hope the spacecraft does exactly what you programmed it to do. \u00a0<\/p>\n Luckily, spoiler alert \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n PERSEVERANCE LAUNCH BROADCAST (ARCHIVAL): [inaudible] indicates chute deploy. The navigation has confirmed that the parachute has deployed and we are seeing significant deceleration\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: As Katie watched from Earth, orange and white parachutes billowed up above the capsule. There was a collective sigh of relief, although it wasn\u2019t over yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n PERSEVERANCE LAUNCH BROADCAST: Heat shield sep. Perseverance has now slowed to subsonic speeds and the heat shield has been separated. This allows both the radar and the cameras to get their first look at the surface.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: On the footage from the capsule\u2019s cameras, you can see the red dusty surface come into focus. And a big crater called Jezero growing larger and larger.\u00a0<\/p>\n PERSEVERANCE LAUNCH BROADCAST: Sky crane maneuver has started. About 20 meters above the surface. \u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Then, the craziest part. Rocket engines on the descent stage fired, stopping it in midair. And at the same time, the rover came into focus on the cameras. It slowly lowered to the surface on cables. And then\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n PERSEVERANCE LAUNCH BROADCAST: Still getting signals from MRO. Touchdown confirmed<\/a>. Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking the signs of past life.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I just burst into tears, because just the swell of emotion, it was just too much. And I just cried. I cried happy tears, relief tears, and then I was like, \u201cOh my gosh, our job is just starting.\u201d And of course, the engineers are celebrating. A lot of them, you know, they\u2019re done. They move on to another project.\u00a0 They\u2019ve gotten the rover to Mars. And for us, it was like, \u201cOh no, now it gets down to business.\u201d And so it was like, \u201cOkay, we\u2019ve got a long night ahead of us.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: There\u2019s a tradition at JPL: to make working the long, hard hours of Mars time a little sweeter, mission control has a chest full of ice cream. So some of Katie\u2019s colleagues improvised the pandemic version. They had ice cream delivered to her front door. \u00a0<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s time for us to get down to business. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Time Passing Marimba by Eric Chevalier]\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Through the Artemis program<\/a>, NASA is sending humans to the Moon. NASA is building a Moon Base<\/a>. And one day, astronauts will walk on Mars. Landing humans on Mars is a hard goal. It doesn\u2019t happen all at once<\/a>. NASA science has been laying the groundwork for human exploration for years, and Katie says Perseverance is one step on that path.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE:\u00a0Robots are great because they can test things out ahead of time. They can decrease the risk. And there is a lot of risk to sending humans to another planet. And so our robotic explorers can help reduce the risks for human explorers<\/a>. \u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Along with its science goals, which we\u2019ll get into, Perseverance is exploring Mars before humans get there and testing technologies that we\u2019ll need to stay alive on the planet. Mars is one of humanity\u2019s prime targets in the search for life beyond Earth. In fact, Perseverance\u2019s main goal is to find evidence of ancient life on Mars. Perseverance has spent more than five years exploring Mars, first in Jezero Crater, and now\u2014after a long and arduous climb\u2014along the crater\u2019s northern rim.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to spend some time talking about this place\u2014Jezero<\/a>\u2014because it is particularly important to the search for life. Some 3.5 billion years ago, a river of liquid water flowed through it. It carved out a canyon and formed a river delta. Now, today, Mars has no liquid water, although there is some water frozen in ice caps. And it has no life. But Mars was once habitable. Which means we could find evidence of tiny microbial life that has long since died off, kind of like how we find fossils of ancient seabed creatures on Earth. \u00a0<\/p>\n Perseverance has made some major discoveries<\/a> in that search for life over the years. And the rover also brought along another explorer: Ingenuity<\/a>, the first aircraft to ever fly on another planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n So today we\u2019re catching up with Perseverance\u2014what the rover\u2019s been up to, and what\u2019s next. To help us do that, we have producer Christian Elliott. Christian, where do we even start?\u00a0<\/p>\n PRODUCER CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: Hey Jacob. Well, let\u2019s start with Katie.\u00a0She\u2019s our guide today for all things Mars. She first got interested in the Red Planet back in grad school. Before that she studied Earth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: Mars has so many similarities to Earth, especially Mars, billions of years ago, we think was quite similar to Earth<\/a>, but it has taken a very different path than Earth. Mars was once habitable. It\u2019s not anymore. It\u2019s cold and dry, but yet it has this fascinating rock record that tells us that Mars was once very Earth-like. So for me, Mars was the perfect marriage of the familiar and the alien and the mysterious.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB:\u00a0I love that way of describing Mars, and that\u2019s exactly why NASA has been so interested in Mars for so long, right? Because it could have hosted life, sometime in the distant past.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, that\u2019s exactly right. And Perseverance is part of a long lineage of rovers<\/a>. Remember, the dream is human explorers on Mars. Artemis II<\/a> just demonstrated why it\u2019s so crucial to have humans out in space, making observations with their own eyes. But the next best thing is robotic exploration. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: Yeah, so NASA has been on this quest to discover whether Mars, the Red Planet, was capable of hosting life, whether it did once host life, is there life beyond Earth? And so there is a strategy in place. \u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Tightrope Walker by Nicolas Montazaud]\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: The first phase of NASA\u2019s Mars strategy was looking for signs of ancient water. That started back in 1997 with at series of landings.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And the Pathfinder lander and the small Sojourner rover<\/a> and the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity<\/a> were really looking for water. They were following the water on Mars<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: They found signs that water flowed on Mars up to about 2 billion years ago. Then there was Curiosity, the rover that Katie worked on as a grad student. That rover landed in 2012.\u00a0It was Curiosity\u2019s job to look for evidence that Mars was once habitable.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: So not just water, but also the basic ingredients for life, like organic molecules and the environments and conditions in which life could have existed.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: And again, the answer was yes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: So at this point NASA\u2019s rovers have established that sometime in the past Mars had both water and the basic building blocks for life to form<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Exactly. So then NASA was like, can we ratchet things up a notch and answer the big question?\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And so then we wanted to really take it to the next level and say, \u201cOK, Mars had water. Mars had habitable environments. Did Mars have life?\u201d And in order to answer that question, the Perseverance rover was designed with a new payload specifically designed to look for signs of possible ancient life in the rock record.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: And I\u2019m going to keep you waiting on what exactly Perseverance has found so far in that rock record for a little bit, because before we get there, I think we need to cover what makes Perseverance unique.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Yeah, scientists always talk about needing more data and once they get some observations they get some answers, but they get even more questions. So after these rovers that came before Perseverance, what can Perseverance do to answer this big question?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Well first, Mars is a pretty rough place to drive a robot around. These rovers don\u2019t last forever. For one thing, the rocks are just super sharp.\u00a0Remember Curiosity, Perseverance\u2019s predecessor? That rover\u2019s been exploring Mars since 2012. But some 300 days into the rover\u2019s mission, the team noticed the rocks were tearing up the metal wheels. A tire change up there is not an option.\u00a0So for Perseverance, they totally redesigned those wheels<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: We did not want to have to worry about the wheels and the damage that we might do to the wheels. So the engineers put those new wheels for Perseverance through their paces, and they drove those things round and around and around to make sure that, you know, there would be no dents, no scratches, no tears, no rips. And so far, they\u2019ve been very successful. And our wheels are not a thing we think about on Perseverance.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: And Christian, Perseverance also has some new and improved instruments right? I know, for example, that it has microphones aboard. Curious Universe released the very first sound recordings from Mars<\/a> back in 2021, which is just cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yes, Curious Universe has the claim to fame of the first podcast to ever feature a microphone-recorded sound from Mars.\u00a0Here\u2019s a recording of Perseverance driving around. You can hear the rover itself and the Martian wind.\u00a0<\/p>\n [SFX: Tinny rattling sounds of Perseverance driving on Mars]\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: It sounds a little different from how it would on Earth, because the atmosphere is less dense, so sound can\u2019t travel as well. And the 96 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere absorbs certain frequencies.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Yeah, but it\u2019s just mind-blowing that we can hear this other planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, it blows my mind. And it\u2019s not just us audio nerds. Katie also loves the microphones.<\/p>\n KATIE: We can hear the surface of Mars. We can hear those wheels grinding on rocks. We can hear the mechanisms of the rover moving around. So really making that experience a multi-sensory like we were there, kind of experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: There are also more color cameras. And yes, a bunch more scientific instruments <\/a>because, Katie told me, this time scientists wanted to go beyond analyzing the composition of rocks, like Curiosity does. They wanted to see the patterns and textures in those rocks because life is one of the biggest forces that changes how rocks look. \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: So not just knowing are organics in a rock, but where are the organics in the rock? Because sometimes, depending on where those organics are, or where certain minerals are, that could be a pattern or fingerprint that life leaves behind. But if you take that rock, break it down into tiny little pieces and put it into an instrument, you lose a lot of information. And so Perseverance has special instruments on its arm so that they can analyze little postage stamp-sized pieces of Martian rocks, but they preserve the textures. They\u2019re non-destructive. And so we can actually make these maps of composition, organics and different minerals, but without damaging those rocks and preserving those possible patterns that might be there.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Now, Perseverance has another pretty cool new trick.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: OK, is it helicopter time?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yes, it is helicopter time. We\u2019re going\u00a0to talk about Ingenuity.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ingenuity is this little 4-pound robot helicopter. It has two rotors, each four feet long, a solar panel and four long landing legs. It hitched a ride to Mars onboard Perseverance.\u00a0And Ingenuity was a huge success, but it almost didn\u2019t happen. Katie was a grad student when the science team proposed flying a helicopter on Mars. It didn\u2019t work out at the time. It seemed too risky and expensive.\u00a0But then, around when she became deputy project scientist, the engineering team revived the idea as a technology concept demonstration.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And so I thought, \u201cWow, this has really come full circle, where I was part of this concept, thought it was done, and then now it has re-emerged,\u201d and literally phoenix rising from the ashes in this case. It was amazing to see the development of Ingenuity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD GRIP: It was a wild concept. And you kind of go into that expecting that, you know, it may fizzle.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: That\u2019s H\u00e5vard Grip<\/a>. He\u2019s an engineer at JPL on the Ingenuity helicopter team.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: But, you know, we just kept going, and we had this saying, \u201cWNDY\u201d, meaning \u201cWe\u2019re not dead yet.\u201d And so that was a mantra that we lived by for years as we kept improving the technology, taking step by step.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: H\u00e5vard has a pretty unique claim to fame: the first Mars helicopter pilot.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: I led the aerodynamics and flight control development for Ingenuity, and then I was the chief pilot for the first 37 flights on Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Now, don\u2019t worry we\u2019re coming back to Katie to hear about Perseverance\u2019s journey through Jezero Crater, and all the science findings so far, but first, we absolutely have to talk about Ingenuity.\u00a0This little helicopter is an experimental aircraft. A helicopter flight on Mars had never been attempted before. So the team was hoping for a Wright Brothers moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: Our goal was to prove that it\u2019s possible to fly a helicopter in the Martian atmosphere, which was not at all obvious when we started out. The Martian atmosphere is extremely thin, just about one percent of the atmospheric density that we have here on Earth, and so to fly in that is incredibly challenging, but we thought it was possible, and we set out to prove that.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: And at the risk of maybe asking a silly question, what makes this so hard?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: No, it\u2019s not a silly question at all. I mean, I am no engineer. But H\u00e5vard says it\u2019s mostly about that really thin atmosphere. He said it comes down to a triangle of mass, thrust, and power. \u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: In order to have mass, you have to have thrust. In order to have thrust, you have to have power. But in order to have power, you have to have mass. And so you kind of go around that triangle and try to make the system close.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Closing the system was a delicate balance of weight and size. You need big enough blades to generate lift, but it can\u2019t be too heavy to fly. Each rotor blade weighs just two ounces. They spin at 2,500 rotations per minute to lift the tissue-box-sized body of the helicopter. Helicopter blades on Earth only spin about 400 rotations per minute, for comparison. And a helicopter is a fragile thing. It had been packaged up in the belly of the rover, but the ride down to Mars wasn\u2019t exactly smooth.\u00a0So when Perseverance dropped the helicopter off, it wasn\u2019t a guarantee that it would still work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: When we got dropped off on the surface, and the rover drove away, and we talked to the helicopter, and, you know, it was still alive, OK, you know, after, after seven months in cruise and being dropped, you know, to the surface of Mars, there was an incredible relief. And, you know, sort of a jubilant atmosphere at that point.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Then, it was time for the moment of truth: the first flight<\/a>. April 19, 2021. \u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Puzzle Pieces by Noclas Montazaud]\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: The plan was simple: power up the rotors, fly straight up about 10 feet, and then land safely.\u00a0On the broadcast, you can see the mission control team sitting around a U-shaped table. In the middle is a life-sized model of Ingenuity.\u00a0They sent the real Ingenuity its instructions, and then they waited. You hear from the mission control team that they\u2019ve received data back from Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n INGENUITY FIRST FLIGHT BROADCAST (ARCHIVAL): Confirming that we have helicopter data products, helicopter telemetry, helicopter events.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Then you hear from flight control H\u00e5vard, in his usual understated way\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n INGENUITY FIRST FLIGHT BROADCAST: Ingenuity is reporting having performed spin up, take off, climb\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: It worked perfectly. Ingenuity flew<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n INGENUITY FIRST FLIGHT BROADCAST: \u2026confirms that Ingenuity has performed its first flight of a powered aircraft on another planet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Then, the first images came down\u2014Mars seen from above, from a helicopter point of view for the first time ever. The team got its Wright Brothers moment. Here\u2019s the sound of Ingenuity flying on Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n [SFX: Muted whirr of helicopter blades spinning on Mars]\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: The team tore up their contingency speech, which they\u2019d written up in case the helicopter crashed.\u00a0Then it was time to fly again. For the next two flights, everything was planned out to the T and simulated tons of times in advance. On each of those flights, Ingenuity performed perfectly. The demonstration mission was accomplished, and Ingenuity was still ready for more. So NASA said keep on going. Fly this little helicopter further and explore Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: Once we got this job of, hey, go explore Mars, we were totally in totally uncharted territory. Up to that point, we were just playing in our own little sandbox. So we spent a long time figuring exactly what that sandbox should look like, picking it when we got to Mars, and doing, you know, little flights in there. But now suddenly we had to go to areas we\u2019d never seen before, right? We had never imaged it. We\u2019d fly, effectively blind, into into new areas. And so my job at that point largely rolled around like figuring out, how do you do that? How do you take a helicopter and land it safely when you\u2019re worried about five-centimeter rocks into an area that you\u2019ve never seen before. Nobody\u2019s ever seen it before And that was really exciting as to kind of find our way there, figure out ways that you could do that when it\u2019s not at all obvious that it\u2019s doable, and see it work.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: I\u2019m sure you\u2019re wondering: What\u2019s it like to actually fly a helicopter on another planet?\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: I am. I mean, I can\u2019t fly a helicopter on this planet or any other one, but I can sort of imagine it. On Earth you\u2019re in a cockpit, you\u2019re reacting to things in real time. But with Mars, there\u2019s that time delay. It takes up to 40 minutes for a message to get to Mars and back. And that means that from Earth, H\u00e5vard\u2019s not flying in real time, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, that\u2019s exactly right. H\u00e5vard is more than 100 million miles away from Ingenuity in the control room at JPL. He says it\u2019s mostly about anticipating what Mars will throw at you. You send Ingenuity instructions and the helicopter tries to follow them as best it can.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: So it\u2019s a little bit like a game where you think very, very hard about the next move and you want to be very, very cautious about it, and then you know, you hold your breath and you hope that you know your opponent doesn\u2019t crush you on the next move.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: And what blows my mind is the team was not expecting this to go so well. H\u00e5vard was hoping for one successful flight. But Ingenuity flew dozens of times over three years, covering more than 10 miles.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: You know, we would have been thrilled, ecstatic to have, you know, this thing take off and land again. \u00a0<\/p>\n [MUSIC: Positivity is the Key by Nicolas Montazaud]\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: When you look back at what we ended up doing compared to what we thought we could do, the gap is just enormous. The first time somebody talked about flying off, you know, a little bit, you know, couple of hundred meters in that direction, we were almost snickering about, you know, just, it\u2019s wildly you know, out of scope for what we can do, and then looking at where we ended up, you know, it\u2019s just amazing, you know, how much that technology could be squeezed into service of just doing more and more and more. \u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Ingenuity took its 72nd and final flight in 2024<\/a>, after which a rotor blade was damaged while landing.\u00a0That was a sad day for the team. But Ingenuity worked so well, now when scientists and engineers think of exploring Mars, they think of helicopters.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: I think at this point it\u2019s almost impossible to think about Mars missions without thinking, Well, you know, what role could the helicopter play in this<\/a>? \u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: It\u2019s such a cool case study, the fact that this Mars helicopter almost didn\u2019t happen at all, and then it turned out to work way better than anyone expected. It just proves what happens at NASA over and over. You\u2019ve got this problem that seems like it\u2019s really hard or maybe even impossible, you put some NASA experts on it, and it doesn\u2019t stay impossible for long. It\u2019s just what NASA does.\u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: In order to land humans on Mars, we\u2019ve got to figure out where good sites to land, we\u2019ve got to figure out where the resources are, like water ice on Mars, and helicopters are a perfect platform for answering those questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: H\u00e5vard imagines a future where astronauts on Mars use helicopters like Ingenuity. \u00a0<\/p>\n H\u00c5VARD: We use drones here on Earth, like they\u2019re very powerful here on Earth, you know, just because they can fly over things, they can get over the horizon quickly and easily. Helicopters, I think, will play a similar role on Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: And this is where we get to say, the future isn\u2019t actually that far off, right? NASA already has plans not to send another Ingenuity, but a whole fleet of Ingenuity-class rovers to explore Mars. It\u2019s a mission called Skyfall. \u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, that project hadn\u2019t even been announced when we talked with H\u00e5vard. These next-gen helicopters will carry more scientific equipment and scout ahead for landing sites and map water ice below the surface.\u00a0Now for her part, Katie admits she has a pretty rover-centric view. She sees Mars all day every day through Perseverance\u2019s eyes\u2014er, cameras. So when Ingenuity flew and she got the first images of the rover from the sky\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I mean, it\u2019s just wow. You know, our whole world is this rover exploring this place. And then you see these rovers from a totally different perspective. And you\u2019re reminded that you\u2019re this rover driving around in this big crater. We often live and see Mars through the rover. And it\u2019s a reminder that, you know, that rover is indeed a robot working on another planet.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: So we\u2019ve got this robot hard at work. And Christian, we talked about those big goals that NASA had with its Mars rover program from the beginning, like finding signs of water, finding evidence of the conditions for life. And the biggest challenge, finding proof of ancient life. So, where is Perseverance at in all of that?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Well, the discoveries started the moment Perseverance touched down in Jezero Crater, and they really haven\u2019t stopped.\u00a0The first thing was a type of rock scientists hadn\u2019t studied much on Mars before: igneous rocks. These are formed by molten lava or magma crystallizing.\u00a0It\u2019s pretty easy to tell how old igneous rocks are, which is why scientists are excited about them.\u00a0Now the Curiosity Rover is exploring Gale Crater, which is mostly sedimentary rock. NASA sent Perseverance to Jezero Crater, more than 2,300 miles away. That\u2019s about as far as New York is from Las Vegas. But they were sort of expecting a lot of the same rocks.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: When we first landed on the floor of Jezero Crater, when we first landed on the floor of Jezero Crater, surrounded by these rocks, my first thought when I looked at them was, we\u2019re not in Gale Crater anymore. \u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: That\u2019s because the rocks looked a lot different. Perseverance ground up the rocks and studied them and confirmed they were igneous.\u00a0And it also found signs they\u2019d interacted with water sometime in the past, long after they crystallized.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: Typically you don\u2019t think of igneous rocks which have a very fiery birth, are not necessarily the kind of rocks where you think, \u201cOh yeah, life, is there,\u201d but because these rocks had interacted with water at least over several episodes, there\u2019s a possibility that microbes might have taken advantage of the water in these rocks, the minerals and chemicals in these rocks to actually live in there too. So it was a pretty exciting discovery to find both igneous rocks and rocks that had interacted with water.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Then, Perseverance moved on from that area and found sedimentary rocks, Katie\u2019s expertise.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE:\u00a0Love the igneous rocks, but we\u2019d been in them for about a year. And so the first outcrop of sedimentary rocks, which it was an image called Enchanted Lake. A good, a great name for that kind of outcrop. I was just like, \u201cAh, these are my rocks.\u201d And it was so great to finally be in the sedimentary rocks\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Ah, I love when geologists just get excited about rocks. So she\u2019s in her home turf. This is where the discoveries start flowing, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Poll Observers by Laurent Dury]\u00a0<\/p>\n [SFX: Ocean waves crashing, water droplets falling]\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I\u2019ll set the scene here. We\u2019re in an ancient Martian river valley. And those sedimentary rocks are part of a fan, so it\u2019s a deposit that was formed when water brought sediment into the crater, and then the grains of sand and mud and the pebbles that that water was carrying, they all settled down on onto the crater floor and left behind this sedimentary fan. And so we were looking for evidence of stable water. What kind of environments were there? How deep was the water? How fast was it flowing? How long, relatively, was it here? \u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Over the next few months, using rock samples and photographs, the science team was able to piece together exactly what had happened in this Martian river valley some 2 billion years ago:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n [SFX: River flowing, waves on a lake shore]\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And what we discovered was a pretty stable, long-lived, and habitable lake, river, and delta system. So we were able to work out the kind of details and walk through time from a time when there were rivers flowing in to, OK, there\u2019s enough water now that we\u2019re actually forming a lake, and then a lot of sediment comes in, forming this delta that moves out over the crater floor, and then we have at the very end these really energetic, catastrophic floods that bring these big boulders into the crater deposited on the top of the fan. So it was a really dynamic environment, and it was by studying the rocks very carefully that we were able to put that story together.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Right around this time, Perseverance made its biggest discovery yet. The science team had driven the rover up into the channel<\/a> that once fed water into the crater, a place called Neretva Vallis.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And when we got there, we found very interesting features in those rocks, and turned out to be amongst the most exciting rocks ever discovered on Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: You know, NASA scientists are not prone to hyperbole. So when Katie says these rocks are exciting, she must really mean it. \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: What we found in these rocks were very distinct but small, millimeter-sized features. The first ones we found, we called poppy seeds, because they were little dark flecks in the rock that were a unique mineral called vivianite. And you would be forgiven for not knowing the mineral vivianite, because I did not know the mineral vivianite when we discovered it.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: I\u2019m glad I\u2019m forgiven because I was certainly not familiar with vivianite. It\u2019s an iron phosphate mineral. It can form when you have iron from rocks combined with water and organic compounds. That\u2019s cool. But the headline here\u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: When you find vivianite on Earth, sometimes you find it associated with decaying organic matter here on Earth, and so involved in life and associated with microbial activity.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: OK, so I can feel we\u2019re taking baby steps to the big question. We\u2019re taking baby steps. Was there life on Mars, Christian?\u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Crisis of Conscience by Sarah Revino and Lester Fraces]\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: I cannot give you a solid answer to that, Jacob. But I will say, they found these poppy seeds. Then they drove a bit further, where they found these even bigger features that they named leopard spots<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And we call them leopard spots because they really look like leopard spots! We have this red rock, and these small features, they\u2019re round, that have dark gray rims, and then kind of a bleached white inner center.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: These are also rings of iron phosphate. And they can form through chemical reactions. That\u2019s chemistry, not life.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: But one of the reasons why we think life might have been involved in the formation of these features<\/a> is because the particular minerals involved in these reactions, they tend to form most easily, either at really high temperatures or with life to help those reactions move along. And based on what we know about these rocks, we don\u2019t necessarily think that they experienced really high temperatures. So if you can\u2019t explain these minerals with heat, one of the most reasonable alternative explanations is life, and we\u2019re not sure that life was there, you know, that\u2019s still a question, and that\u2019s why we call these features potential biosignatures. And the potential is doing a lot of work here, but this is probably the first time that we\u2019ve really had life as a truly compelling alternative hypothesis, and one that is really worthy of consideration.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: So what I\u2019m hearing is they\u2019re sort of trying to systematically rule out every cause other than life. These aren\u2019t a dead ringer biosignature, but they\u2019re potentially a biosignature.\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, and as you pointed out, NASA scientists are super careful when they talk about this stuff. They are not prone to hyperbole. So Katie saying this is the first time we\u2019ve had life as a solid hypothesis to explain a feature on a rock, that\u2019s huge. And I should note, this discovery is one only Perseverance could have made with those new instruments that let the rover preserve the patterns in the rock, instead of just drilling and grinding it up. But to really nail down whether these spots are a biosignature, Perseverance\u2019s rock sample vials<\/a> are going to have to make it back to a lab on Earth somehow. That will have to wait for a future sample return mission.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: Well, Christian, there\u2019s always more rocks to find. So what\u2019s next for Perseverance?\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: So Perseverance\u2019s science mission continues, and we waved goodbye to Cheyava Falls after spending a couple of months there and said, \u201cOK, we have a whole new set of rocks to explore.\u201d So we spent the first three and a half to four years of the mission looking at rocks, studying rocks that were inside Jezero Crater, and that means that they are most likely younger than the formation of the crater itself. But we\u2019ve now transitioned to exploring the crater rim of Jezero and the rocks even beyond the crater rim. And so these rocks are older than the formation of Jezero, and these really old rocks are probably amongst the oldest rocks in the solar system. And that\u2019s really cool, because these rocks can tell us about not only the early history of Mars, but also the early history of the solar system. \u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: I\u2019m just going to say that again for emphasis: some of the oldest rocks in the solar system. There aren\u2019t that many places we can find 4-plus billion-year-old rocks that help us understand how the solar system itself formed.\u00a0We definitely can\u2019t study that period of time on Earth, because we have plate tectonics here that\u2019s constantly shuffling up the rocks, recycling Earth\u2019s crust.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: So we are exploring a period of solar system history that just simply isn\u2019t studyable on our own planet, and we\u2019re doing that with the Perseverance rover.\u00a0<\/p>\n JACOB: So, there was one more question that Christian, I know you and I both had before we started working on this episode. You know, I\u2019ve seen people not in NASA but in the public call Perseverance \u201cPercy\u201d. Sometimes people call Ingenuity \u201cGinny\u201d.\u00a0People love these robots. They\u2019ve anthropomorphized them for years. They pretend they\u2019re humans or cartoon characters with feelings and things like that. I just wonder how the science team feels about all that and the way people react?\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Yeah, to add one more anecdote, I remember the Opportunity rover\u2019s final message<\/a> to NASA, sent during a planetary dust storm, was translated as \u201cMy battery is low and it\u2019s getting dark.\u201d And I remember people crying real tears for Opportunity, or Oppy. The science team sent the rover the Billie Holiday song \u201cI\u2019ll Be Seeing You\u201d on its final day. People just really care for these robots. And the science team does too.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: I\u2019ll take you back to Curiosity, because this is the first time I realized I had feelings for a rover.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Remember, at the beginning Katie was a grad student. She didn\u2019t feel super emotionally invested in Curiosity. She just thought it was cool, until one day when everything changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: It was just a run-of-the-mill day. I was doing rover operations, and I think Curiosity might have had a pretty minor, minor issue. And I realized I was like, \u201cWow, I really care about Curiosity.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n [Music: Imagine Tomorrow by Nicolas Montazaud] \u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: And it was this like, I don\u2019t know\u2014I don\u2019t know if it was like\u2014it\u2019s like that moment in a rom-com where you\u2019re like, \u201cOh, I have feelings.\u201d And, you know, I had not been aware of them beforehand, and it just kind of hit me in this wave of like, \u201cWow, I\u2019m having this emotional reaction. And I didn\u2019t think I cared in this way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n CHRISTIAN: Katie said each Mars rover becomes sort of like a family member for the team that controls it. They spend so much time together. And the team kind of projects a personality onto the rover.\u00a0They\u2019ve had the rovers sing happy birthday to themselves. It\u2019s an inanimate object of course, and they know that. But still\u2026\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n KATIE: Perseverance is now five years old, but it was the new one on the scene. The \u201cLook at me. I\u2019ve got all these fancy things I can do, and I drive so fast.\u201d And then you\u2019ve got Curiosity. It\u2019s been on the surface for a long time. It\u2019s wise. It\u2019s, you know, moving its way up the mountain. Just really, day in, day out doing the work has overcome a lot. And, you know, we really start to, we project our feelings about the rovers, but also the experiences that the rovers are having, the anomalies that they\u2019ve had, the challenges that they\u2019ve overcome. And so, yeah, the rovers feel like real characters. I was gonna say real people. They become beings that we care about, we have emotions about, and that we see as having personalities and emotions too.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Members](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/NHQ202102180057~large.jpg\")
Members of NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars rover team study data on monitors in mission control, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1-landing-pia24428-1041.jpg\")
The Mars 2020 descent stage lowers NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover.<\/p>\n![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24487~large.jpg\")
An image taken during the first drive of NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover March 4, 2021.<\/p>\n![\"NASA](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA13389~large.jpg\")
NASA\u2019s Curiosity rover stretches its robotic arm upward during tests on a tilt table in 2010. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, was one of Perseverance\u2019s predecessors.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pia23966-1041.jpg\")
On Earth, an engineering model of Perseverance takes a drive. Perseverance\u2019s double goes by OPTIMISM: Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars. This test facility, called the Mars Yard, simulates Martian terrain and has served as a testing ground for many fully-engineered rover twins.<\/p>\n![\"NASA's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24424~large.jpg\")
NASA\u2019s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter can be seen on the belly of the Perseverance rover, ready to be dropped off at the helicopter\u2019s deployment location.<\/p>\n![\"This](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24550~orig.jpg\")
Ingenuity, seen just after its first flight on Mars\u2014and the first powered, controlled flight on another planet. This photo was captured by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard NASA\u2019s Perseverance Mars rover, on April 19, 2021.<\/p>\n![\"Members](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24499~orig.jpg\")
The Ingenuity team reacts to data showing that the helicopter completed its first flight on April 19, 2021.<\/p>\n![\"NASA\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1677-pia25970-image-helicopter.jpeg\")
The 54th flight of Ingenuity, as captured by Perseverance.<\/p>\n![\"Ingenuity](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24591~large.jpg\")
Ingenuity Mars chief pilot H\u00e5vard Grip records data of the first flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter into the official pilot\u2019s logbook for the project\u2014the \u201cNominal Pilot\u2019s Logbook for Planets and Moons.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"NASA\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/e7-ingenuity-pia25884.jpg\")
This view from Ingenuity\u2014taken from an altitude of about 40 feet (12 meters) during its 51st flight\u2014includes Perseverance, visible as a whitish speck at upper left. Perseverance was at the rim of Belva Crater on April 22, 2023.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pia24485-4-1041.jpg\")
Signs of ancient water on Mars. From its landing site, NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover can see a remnant of a fan-shaped deposit of sediments known as a delta.<\/p>\n![\"NASA\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/pia26368orig.jpg\")
NASA\u2019s Perseverance rover discovered leopard spots on a reddish rock nicknamed \u201cCheyava Falls\u201d in Mars\u2019 Jezero Crater in July 2024. Scientists think the spots may indicate that, billions of years ago, the chemical reactions in this rock could have supported microbial life. Other explanations are being considered.<\/p>\n
![\"NASA's](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/PIA24542~large.jpg\")
A selfie on Mars showing Perseverance and Ingenuity<\/p>\n