The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover will search for signs of ancient microbial life, which will advance NASA's quest to explore the past habitability of Mars. The rover has a drill to collect core samples of Martian rock and soil, then store them in sealed tubes for pickup by a future mission that would ferry them back to Earth for detailed analysis. Perseverance will also test technologies to help pave the way for future human exploration of Mars.

The mission uses technological innovations already demonstrated successfully, especially for entry, descent, and landing (EDL). Like NASA's Curiosity rover, the Mars 2020 spacecraft uses a guided entry, descent, and landing system. The landing system on Mars 2020 mission includes a parachute, descent vehicle, and an approach called a "skycrane maneuver" for lowering the rover on a tether to the surface during the final seconds before landing.

The Perseverance rover design minimizes costs and risks because it is largely based on the engineering design for the previous Curiosity rover. The Perseverance long-range mobility system allows it to travel on the surface of Mars over 3 to 12 miles (5 to 20 kilometers). Improvements on Perseverance include a new, more capable wheel design. And for the first time, the rover carries a drill for coring samples from Martian rocks and soil. It gathers and stores the cores in tubes on the Martian surface, using "depot caching." Caching demonstrates a new rover capability of gathering, storing, and preserving samples. This could potentially pave the way for future missions to retrieve the samples and ferry them to Earth for intensive laboratory analysis.