The NASA Perseverance Mars rover is exploring potential landing sites that might one day be used by the rover's rock samples on their return trip to Earth.

The Perseverance spacecraft has been exploring Mars' Jezero Crater since 2021, collecting numerous samples of Martian rock as part of its search for evidence of ancient life on Mars. 

A way to get those samples back to Earth will be needed if scientists want to study them. It is for this reason that the Mars Sample Return campaign has been proposed.

As part of Mars Sample Return, two lander missions would land on Mars and collect Perseverance's samples, launching them to an orbiter that would bring them back to Earth. 

This is an extremely complicated endeavor to be carried out in conjunction with the European Space Agency that is targeted to launch in 2028, which would be aimed to bring back samples to Earth in 2033, as long as all goes well.

 As a prerequisite to any of that, the Mars Sample Return vehicle would need to be able to land in a suitable location before any of that can happen.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a press release Monday saying the rover is seeking a 'dull landing place' that will not surprise future missions.

When picking up samples, sightseeing is not one of the things that need to be done. The flatter and more uninspiring the vista, the better for us, Cook said.

As we mentioned earlier, the future Mars Sample Return missions would require a 200-foot radius patch of land that would be nearly perfectly flat and free from rocks larger than 7.5 inches in diameter.

As the MSR team has already come up with a location in mind, they are calling it the 'landing strip,' because it appears to be so flat. The MSR team used Perseverance's navigation cameras to gather detailed imagery of the landing strip to get a closer look at what was going on at the site. 

NASA's press release stated that the locations were already in our sights before Perseverance landed, but imagery from orbit can only provide so much information.

This up-close-and-personal view of the landing strip shows that we were right on the money. The landing strip is more than likely to make our shortlist of landing and caching sites.'

There will be three different vehicles on board the MSR mission: the Mars Ascent Vehicle, the Sample Retrieval Lander, and the European Space Agency's 'fetch rover.'

Perseverance's samples will be collected by the fetch rover before they are transferred to the Sample Return Lander via a robotic arm attached to the launchpad.

A robot arm will be used by SRL to transfer Perseverance's collected samples from the fetch rover to the MAV, a 10-foot-tall vehicle. In the end, an ESA orbiter will collect the MAV and return it to Earth once the MAV has been launched into orbit.

NASA has revised its Mars Sample Return mission launch date to 2028 and the sample return date to 2033 but is still planning on launching the mission in 2028 and returning samples in 2033.