Eight
spacecraft
are operating
in orbit
around Mars
or exploring
its dusty
surface. In
February
2021, as of
press time,
three more
robotic
emissaries
are scheduled
to rendezvous
with the
red planet,
including
the flagship
NASA rover,
Perseverance.
A Clean Start
Engineers at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory
in Pasadena, California,
work in a sterile room
to calibrate the
Perseverance rover’s
23 cameras before
launch. Given the
rover’s goal of looking
for signs of life on
Mars, technicians took
many precautions to
avoid contaminating
the machine with
Earth-based microbes.
SPENCER LOWELL