Perseverance is the 11th Mars probe launched by NASA and the most sophisticated robot explorer ever sent into space. As of last Thursday, the spacecraft was about 25.6 million miles (41.2 million kilometers) away from its destination and was flying toward Mars at a speed of 1.6 miles (2.5 kilometers) per second.

"NASA has been exploring Mars since Mariner 4 performed a flyby in July of 1965, with two more flybys, seven successful orbiters, and eight landers since then," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement on Wednesday. "Perseverance, which was built from the collective knowledge gleaned from such trailblazers, has the opportunity to not only expand our knowledge of the Red Planet, but to investigate one of the most important and exciting questions of humanity about the origin of life both on Earth and also on other planets