Puzzle-solving rover heads for Mars

NASA's latest Mars rover Perseverance launched on Thursday on an astrobiology mission to look for signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet－and to fly a helicopter-drone on another world for the first time.

Previous trips to Mars have discovered it was far warmer and wetter 3 billion years ago than it is today, creating the conditions necessary for carbon-based life.

Perseverance's goal is to go a step further, and discover whether "habitable" translated to "habited".