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UPI Pictures of the Year 2021 - NEWS & FEATURES

This high-resolution still image is part of a video taken by several cameras as NASA's Perseverance rover touched down on Mars on February 18, 2021. A camera aboard the descent stage captured this shot. A key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, paving the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). In cooperation with ESA (the European Space Agency), subsequent NASA missions would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. NASA/UPI

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