NASA's Perseverance rover will soon begin its primary scientific task: drilling out finger-size cores of martian rock for return to Earth. If all goes well, the first drilling sample will be collected from Jezero crater, a former lakebed, by early August. One kilometer south of its landing site, Perseverance has reached an array of what its operating team calls paver stones—flat, white, dust-coated rocks found throughout the crater floor. Here, on what is believed to be the most ancient terrain in the crater, the team will direct the rover to drill and collect its sample. After that first sampling, the rover will then turn to Séítah, a region of sand dunes and ridges to its west that the car-size rover has skirted past. Séítah has unexpectedly complex geology, including layered terrain that might preserve signs of past life or patterns of water flow. Those exposures could test the idea that Jezero hosted a long-lived lake, with periods of later flooding, as suggested by boulders on the delta front.

NASA 的 Perseverance 漫游车将很快开始其主要的科学任务：钻出手指大小的火星岩石核心以返回地球。如果一切顺利，第一个钻井样本将在 8 月初从前湖床 Jezero 火山口采集。在着陆点以南一公里处，毅力号已经到达了一系列其运营团队称之为铺路石的地方——在整个火山口底部发现的平坦、白色、涂有灰尘的岩石。在这里，在被认为是火山口中最古老的地形上，该团队将指示漫游车进行钻孔并收集样本。在第一次采样之后，火星车将转向塞塔，这是一个沙丘和山脊的西部地区，汽车大小的火星车已经绕过了它。Séítah 的地质出乎意料地复杂，包括可能保留过去生命迹象或水流模式的分层地形。正如三角洲前缘的巨石所暗示的那样，这些暴露可能会检验杰泽罗拥有一个长期存在的湖泊，后来洪水泛滥的想法。