One year on Mars: Here are milestones achieved by NASA's Perseverance rover

NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed a timespan of full Earth 12 months after its successful touchdown on February 19, 2021.

Let's take a look at the milestones it achieved:

During this time on Mars, the rover completed many firsts from its to-do list: collecting the first rock cores of another planet, serving as the base station for the Ingenuity helicopter, extracting oxygen from the thin Martian air, and setting driving records.

This rover weighs proximately a ton, touching down in Mar’s Jezero crater previous year after being travelling for 300 million miles over seven months. The landing was the ultimate beginning of the first point for this ambitious mission in which NASA aims to learn whether life ever existed on Mars. The scientists at NASA identified Jezero Crater, an ancient lakebed formed billions of years ago. The rover has been sent to collect rocks from the crater, then returning to Earth with samples for future missions.

The Perseverance rover has till now collected six core samples from the red planet and will be collecting two more rocks in the coming weeks. The scientists assume that these rocks will be the key provider for chronology for the formation of Jezero Crater and for the age of lake that resided there.

Other than serving as the essential base station for the Ingenuity, the very first helicopter on the red planet, the rover also tested the first prototype oxygen generator on Mars, called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment).

The Nasa Perseverance recently broke the record for the most distance driven by a rover on the red planet in a single day by travelling for 320 meters on February 14. It performed this entire drive using its self-driving software that allows the rover to find its own path around obstacles and rocks,