Jacob Pinter

We're going to spend some time talking about this place, Jezero, because it is particularly important to the search for life.

Some three and a half 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.

Perseverance has made some major discoveries in that search for life over the years.

And the rover also brought along another explorer, Ingenuity, the first aircraft to ever fly on another planet.

So today we're catching up with Perseverance, what the rover's been up to and what's next.

And to help us do that, we have producer Christian Elliott.

Christian, where do we even start?

I love that way of describing Mars.

And that's exactly why NASA has been so interested in Mars for so long, right?

Because it could have hosted life sometime in the distant past.

So at this point, NASA's rovers have established that sometime in the past, Mars had both water and the basic building blocks for life to form.

Yeah, scientists always talk about needing more data.

And once they get some observation, then they get some answers, but they get even more questions.

So after these rovers that came before Perseverance, you know, then what could Perseverance do to answer this big question?

And Christian, Perseverance has some new and improved instruments, right?