Liftoff planned for July 30th It will arrive next Feb.
And they’re taking…a “helicopter” (weighing under 4 lbs). Cool!
hopefully it works unlike the one that crashed because one part used metric measurements but another part did not. Amazing that screw up made it through QA
Red rover, red rover, send your kajillions 
right over!
I’m teasing, of course. Space exploration will be the ultimate savior of humanity!
~VOW
Interestingly, the rover will collect samples for later retrieval and return to Earth by some future mission. It’ll be interesting to see if that ever happens.
It could happen. The crew of Apollo 12 retrieved parts of Surveyor 3 and brought them back to Earth from the moon.
Is that the only instance of an object returned from another planetary body?
There were probes to comets but don’t know if they brought back anything.
They’re also going to check in on Matt Damon and make sure he’s doing ok.
Perfect timing. Why waste the money on healthcare in this year of the plague?
Holy cow, Perseverance even comes with a helicopter!
The US spends 3.6 trillion on healthcare per year. This mission costs $2.1 billion, or 5 hours of healthcare nationwide. Canceling it won’t make a dent. And in fact most of that cost was sunk long before the pandemic.
The Hayabusa probe got some asteroid dust. And the other lunar landings brought back rocks.
There were also the American Stardust mission which successfully returned samples from a comet for analysis on Earth (the outer parts of the comet that is, not the main nucleus); and the American Genesis probe with the mission of capturing particles from the Solar wind and returning them to Earth–unfortunately the Genesis sample-return capsule kind of crashed-landed and broke open in the Utah desert (instead of being gently caught in mid-air by a helicopter), although scientists were eventually able to salvage most of what they wanted to get from the mission.
According to this article, it costs about $25 million to build a hospital. So that’s about 80 hospitals that could be built for the money it will cost to satisfy some grownup little boys jerking off to their space ship fantasies. (correct me if my math is wrong.)
And in 2019 Americans spent the cost of 428 hospitals watching grown men trying to hit a ball with a stick.
But hey, people are dying to see some baseball, right?
That’s their own money they’re spending, not taxpayer money. What part of that don’t you understand?
I could point out how much taxpayer money gets spent building baseball stadiums (with ever-more-lavish “skyboxes” for the rich and shrinking space for regular fans). But I’ll be charitable and assume that you’re against that sort of thing (both “taxpayer dollars for sports stadiums” and also “ever-more-lavish skyboxes for the fatcats and less room for regular fans”).
But “80 hospitals that could be built for the money it will cost to satisfy some grownup little boys jerking off to their space ship fantasies” did not sound to me like a complaint merely that it was tax dollars being spent on the “space ship fantasies” of “grownup little boys”.
How much $ did we piss down a hole in the sand in Iraq? Well, at least we filled up some hospitals! Maybe switch budgets between the military and NASA… 
More amusing that jaycat seems to think hospitals are built and staffed using tax money. Sanders supporters would thrilled.