Perseverance rover: From Baker Street to Mars

American space agency NASA’s latest Mars mission, the Perseverance rover is set to land on the red planet on February 18, 2021.

On the rover is a device named after fiction’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, which is designed to hunt for sand-grain sized molecules on the Martian surface for clues.

Sherlock Holmes would be lost without his partner Watson; NASA has made sure SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) is partnered with a camera called WATSON that will take high resolution pictures of the surface.

The two instruments are designed to work in tandem to study rock surfaces and map out the presence of minerals and organic compounds, ideally looking for carbon based molecules.

SHERLOC was built at NASA's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which leads the Perseverance mission, while WATSON was built at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego.

Once the instruments find promising samples, the rover will collect core samples which will be stored and sealed in metal tubes that will be deposited on Mars for a future mission to collect and bring back to the Earth to be studied.