Mars Persevrance Rover Landing Site
 Original 1970's USGS / NASA Geological Map of the Planet Mars. 
Original map of Syrtis Major Quadrangle (late 1970's) produced by NASA & USGA current landing exploration site of the Curiosity Rover.
"Geologic Map of the Syrtis Major Quadrangle of Mars"
National Aeronautics & Space Administration
 
~ Mars Perseverance Rover ~
Perseverance, nicknamed Percy, is a car-sized Mars rover designed to explore the crater Jezero on Mars as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission. It was manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and launched on 30 July 2020, at 11:50 UTC. Confirmation that the rover successfully landed on Mars was received on 18 February 2021, at 20:55 UTC. As of 3 May 2022, Perseverance has been active on Mars for 427 sols (439 Earth days) since its landing. Following the rover's arrival, NASA named the landing site Octavia E. Butler Landing.
Perseverance has a similar design to its predecessor rover, Curiosity, from which it was moderately upgraded. It carries seven primary payload instruments, nineteen cameras, and two microphones.
 
The rover also carried the mini-helicopter Ingenuity to Mars, an experimental aircraft and technology testbed that made the first powered flight on another planet on 19 April 2021. As of April 21, 2022, it has made 26 successful flights. Ingenuity's 25th successful flight, which occurred on April 8, 2022, saw the helicopter set new records for highest speed and distance traveled during a single flight.
 
The rover's goals include identifying ancient Martian environments capable of supporting life, seeking out evidence of former microbial life existing in those environments, collecting rock and soil samples to store on the Martian surface, and testing oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere to prepare for future crewed missions.
 
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.[16] By the summer of 2012, a program that had been launching a mission to Mars every two years suddenly found itself with no missions approved after 2013.
 
In 2011, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine containing an influential set of recommendations made by the planetary science community, stated that the top priority of NASA's planetary exploration program in the decade between 2013 and 2022 should be to begin a Mars Sample Return campaign, a four-mission project to cache, retrieve, launch, and safely return samples of the Martian surface to Earth. The report stated that NASA should invest in a sample-caching rover as the first step in this effort, with the goal of keeping costs under US$2.5 billion.
 
After the success of the Curiosity rover and in response to the recommendations of the decadal survey, NASA announced its intent to launch a new Mars rover mission by 2020 at the American Geophysical Union conference in December 2012.
 
Though initially hesitant to commit to an ambitious sample-caching capability (and subsequent follow-on missions), a NASA-convened science definition team for the Mars 2020 project released a report in July 2013 that the mission should "select and store a compelling suite of samples in a returnable cache."