[8] The rover also carried the mini-helicopter Ingenuity to Mars, an experimental technology testbed that made the first powered aircraft flight on another planet on April 19, 2021.

[9] On January 18, 2024 (UTC), it made its 72nd and final flight, suffering damage on landing to its rotor blades, possibly all four, causing NASA to retire it.

[12] Despite the high-profile success of the Curiosity rover landing in August 2012, NASA's Mars Exploration Program was in a state of uncertainty in the early 2010s.

Budget cuts forced NASA to pull out of a planned collaboration with the European Space Agency which included a rover mission.

"[22] Additionally, At a rock named "Wildcat Ridge" located within Jezero's well-preserved sedimentary fan deposit, Perseverance found evidence for an ancient lake environment.

[22]They also found that "sediments entering Jezero's lake were deposited in a delta" and "evidence for late-stage, high-energy flooding that carried large boulders into the crater.

[23][24] RIMFAX revealed findings "consistent with a subsurface dominated by solid rock and mafic material"[25] and that "the crater floor experienced a period of erosion before the deposition of the overlying delta strata.

The regularity and horizontality of the basal delta sediments observed in the radar cross sections indicate that they were deposited in a low-energy lake environment.

[33] Owing to the small space in which the SHA must operate, as well as load requirements during sealing activities, the Sample Caching System "is the most complicated, most sophisticated mechanism that we have ever built, tested and readied for spaceflight.

Unlike solar panels, the MMRTG provides engineers with significant flexibility in operating the rover's instruments even at night, during dust storms, and through winter.

The flight software runs on the VxWorks operating system, is written in C and is able to access 4 gigabytes of NAND non-volatile memory on a separate card.

With a mass of 1.8 kg (4.0 lb), the helicopter demonstrated the reality of flight in the rarefied Martian atmosphere and the potential usefulness of aerial scouting for rover missions.

[9] On January 18, 2024 (UTC), it made its 72nd and final flight, suffering the loss of a rotor blade (imaged, by Perseverance, lying on the sand roughly 15 m (49 ft) distant from the upright body of Ingenuity), causing NASA to retire it.

A seventh-grade student, Alexander Mather from Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia, submitted the winning entry at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is housed at the JPL Mars Yard and is used to test operational procedures and to aid in problem solving should any issues arise with Perseverance.

[77] The rover took 29 weeks to travel to Mars and made its landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, to begin its science phase.

[79] The successful landing of Perseverance in Jezero Crater was announced at 20:55 UTC on February 18, 2021,[4] the signal from Mars taking 11 minutes to arrive at Earth.

[81] One such new technology is Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), a technique in which the rover compares images of the surface taken during its descent with reference maps, allowing it to make last minute adjustments to its course.

[83] The landing took place shortly after Mars passed through its northern vernal equinox (Ls = 5.2°), at the start of the astronomical spring, the equivalent of the end of March on Earth.

[86][87] A few days after landing, Perseverance released the first audio recorded on the surface of Mars, capturing the sound of Martian wind.

The rock has since stayed on Perseverance's wheel for around 427 sols (439 days) as the rover traveled over 6 miles (9.7 km) on the martian surface.

[101] In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered “leopard spots” on a reddish rock nicknamed "Cheyava Falls" in Mars’ Jezero Crater, that has some indications it may have hosted microbial life billions of years ago, but further research is needed.

[109] In 2016, NASA SHERLOC co-investigator Dr. Marc Fries — with help from his son Wyatt — was inspired by Geocaching's 2008 placement of a cache on the International Space Station to set out and try something similar with the rover mission.

After floating the idea around mission management, it eventually reached NASA scientist Francis McCubbin, who would join the SHERLOC instrument team as a collaborator to move the project forward.

The Geocaching inclusion was scaled-down to a trackable item that players could search for from NASA camera views and then log on to the site.

[110] In a manner similar to the "Send Your Name to Mars" campaign, the geocaching trackable code was carefully printed on a one-inch, polycarbonate glass disk serving as part of the rover's calibration target.

The disk is made of a prototype astronaut helmet visor material that will be tested for its potential use in crewed missions to Mars.

[114] The orange-and-white parachute used to land the rover on Mars contained a coded message that was deciphered by Twitter users.

NASA's systems engineer Ian Clark used binary code to hide the message "dare mighty things" in the parachute color pattern.

[115][116][117] "Dare mighty things" is a quote attributed to U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and is the unofficial motto of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.