Perseverance Mars rover rolls over Soroya Ridge photo of the day for Sept. 3, 2025

As part of its mission to explore the surface of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover continues its epic journey beyond Jezero Crater‘s rim.

Recently, the rover captured a remarkable image from the summit of an outcrop named Soroya Ridge using its onboard Left Navigation Camera (Navcam).

What is it?

NASA’s Perseverance rover launched in July 2020 and landed in Jezero Crater in 2021. The car-sized robot has since become a key tool in studying our planetary neighbor. Perseverance was built upon previous rover designs like Opportunity and Curiosity, but with a sharper focus on astrobiology and the long-term goal of returning Martian samples to Earth.

A brownish sand dune is seen in front of an empty sky in a greenish-tinted image

An image taken at the Soroya Ridge by NASA’s Perseverance rover. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Perseverance’s primary mission is to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to collect samples of rock and soil that could one day be analyzed on Earth. To do this, it carries a suite of instruments for precise sample collection. These samples will eventually be retrieved by a proposed future mission, although its current status is in jeopardy.