NASA shows Perseverance's first drive on Mars

NASA on Friday showed video of the first drive on the surface of Mars by its Perseverance rover.

A still photo showed wheel tracks of the rover on the surface of the Red Planet.

"So, where the tires made contact or the wheel, I should say or the wheels made contact with the ground when we landed. You can see the wheel tracks that we left on Mars. I don't think I've ever been happier to see wheel tracks and I've seen a lot of them. And this is just a huge milestone for the mission and the mobility team, Anais Zarifian, Perseverance mobility test bed engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said during the virtual press conference.

Perseverance landed on Mars on Feb. 18, accomplishing the riskiest step yet in an epic quest to bring back rocks that could answer whether life ever existed on Mars.

Perseverance, the biggest, most advanced rover ever sent by NASA, became the ninth spacecraft since the 1970s to successfully land on Mars, every one of them from the U.S.

The car-size, plutonium-powered vehicle arrived at Jezero Crater, hitting NASA's smallest and trickiest target yet: a 5-by-4-mile strip on an ancient river delta full of pits, cliffs and rocks.

NASA has named the landing site of the agency's Perseverance rover after the science fiction author Octavia E. Butler.

Scientists believe that if life ever flourished on Mars, it would have happened 3 billion to 4 billion years ago, when water still flowed on the planet.