Share If all goes as planned, NASA’s space vehicle Perseverance will touchdown on Mars Thursday night in the agency’s most ambitious mission to date. The mission’s primary task is to look for traces of life and in doing so, address one of the most fundamental questions in human history: Are we alone? “The ultimate goal is to find traces of microscopic life that may have been present on Mars early in the planet’s history. If there was ever life on Mars, there’s a good chance that the samples from this mission will let us know. This is an extraordinarily exciting time,” says Morten Bo Madsen, a physicist and associate professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute.