The Perseverance spacecraft has begun its quest for signs of life on Mars.

Close-up of rock target “Yeehgo”. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ASU/MSSS)

SuperCam, a set of instruments on board the Perseverance Mars rover, has obtained its first samples in the search for past life on Mars, mission scientists announced Wednesday.

The return to Earth of the rocks and soil it collects in years will provide scientists with the Holy Grail of planetary exploration, according to Jean-Yves le Gall, president of France's National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which designed and developed the mobile observatory.

He believes that these Mars fragments will eventually provide a response to the interesting and basic question of whether life existed somewhere other than Earth.

Last month, NASA's Perseverance rover landed softly on Martian soil after seven months in orbit, sending back black-and-white photographs of the rocky fields of Jezero Crater, just north of the Martian equator.

SuperCam, according to Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy head of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, is a key component of this astrobiology mission.

The shoebox-sized gizmo, which is mounted on the rover's mast and contains spectrometers, a laser, and an audio recording unit, is used to study the chemistry, mineralogy, and molecular composition of Mars' famously red surface.

The SuperCam's laser can zap targets smaller than a pencil point from a distance of up to seven meters (20 feet), allowing the rover to observe areas beyond the scope of its robotic arm.

According to Roger Wiens, an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and SuperCam principal investigator, the laser is uniquely capable of remotely clearing away surface dust, giving all of its instruments a direct view of the targets.

According to LANL's Scott Robinson, the mission experienced a major mishap prior to liftoff, despite the fact that more than 500 engineers and scientists worked on it.

He clarified that just four months before launch, the mast device optics were damaged in a freak accident. The team scrambled to gather spare parts in order to repair the telescope from the ground up.

The mishap ended up being a blessing in disguise.

A 'freak accident'

Engineers discovered a Hubble-like flaw in the original mirror while reassembling the unit, according to Robinson.

Operators discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror had an aberration – later fixed – that impaired image clarity shortly after the observatory's launch in 1990.

According to scientists, the crater where Perseverance landed was once home to a river that flowed into a deep lake and deposited sediment in a fan-shaped delta about 3.5 billion years ago.

The rover's mission is to collect more than two dozen rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, which will be sent back to Earth for analysis in the 2030s.

SuperCam is also photographing rock targets on Mars up close.  (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ASU/MSSS)

Perseverance, which is around the size and weight of an SUV, has a two-meter (seven-foot) robotic arm, 19 sensors, two microphones, and other cutting-edge instruments.

In a few weeks, a small helicopter drone tucked beneath its belly will attempt the first powered flight on another planet.

One of the instruments on board is built to produce oxygen from Mars' predominantly carbon dioxide atmosphere, which would make human habitation much easier.

The rover's primary mission will last just over two years, but it could last much longer.

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