Context: National Aeronautics and Space Administration(NASA) has announced that the official name of its Mars 2020 rover will be ‘Perseverance.’
About Perseverance Rover

• The mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, a long-term effort of robotic exploration of the Red Planet.
• The rover weighs less than 2,300 pounds and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
• The Perseverance rover has recently arrived at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to begin its final preparations for launch.
• This will take place between 17 July and 5 August. It's a seven-month cruise to the Red Planet. Engineers have targeted a touchdown for shortly after 20:30 GMT on Thursday, 18 February, 2021.
• Europe is also supposed to be sending a rover called Rosalind Franklin but there is currently significant uncertainty over whether it will be ready in time.

Selection of Name

• The name was announced by Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, during a celebration at Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, Virginia.
• Zurbuchen was at the school to congratulate seventh grader Alexander Mather, who submitted the winning entry to the agency’s "Name the Rover" essay contest, which received 28,000 entries from K-12 students from every U.S. state and territory.
• Perseverance is the latest in a long line of Red Planet rovers to be named by school-age children, from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012. In each case, the name was selected following a nationwide contest.

Objective: Studying Mars Habitability, Seeking Signs of Past Microbial Life, Collecting and Caching Samples and Preparing for Future Human Missions.