NASA's Mars rover Perseverance, the most advanced robotic astrobiology lab ever flown to another world, neared the end of its seven-month, 293-million-mile (470-million-km) journey on target for a daredevil landing attempt on the red planet.

Hurtling through space across the last 150,000 miles (240,000 km) of its voyage, Perseverance was headed for a touchdown set for Thursday inside a vast basin called Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.

Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles said on Wednesday they were hopeful the six-wheeled, SUV-sized rover would arrive safely on a flat plain beside towering cliffs at the edge of an ancient river delta.

The chief objective of the two-year, $2.7 billion mission is to search for signs of microbial organisms that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the planet was warmer, wetter and presumably more hospitable to life.

Larger and more sophisticated than any of the four mobile science vehicles NASA landed on Mars before it, Perseverance is designed to extract rock samples for analysis back on Earth - the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

Two future missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.

#nasa #mars #perseverance

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