NASA's Perseverance rover will scour Mars for signs of life

NASA's most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance, launches from Earth on July 30, on a mission to seek out signs of ancient microbial life on what was once a river delta three-and-a-half billion years ago. The interplanetary voyage will last six months. Should the SUV-sized vehicle touch down unscathed, it will start collecting and storing rock and soil samples, to be retrieved by a future mission and brought back to Earth in 2031. Perseverance follows in the tire tracks of four rovers before it, all American, which first launched in the late 1990s. Together with satellite and surface probes, they have transformed our understanding of Mars, showing that the Red Planet wasn't always a cold and...