Where is Perseverance right now?
Perseverance is currently about 280,398,993 kilometres from Earth, roughly 1.87 astronomical units, which puts it 15.6 light-minutes away. A command sent now takes that long to arrive, and the reply the same again.
Perseverance is not in Jezero crater any more. It landed on the floor of it on 18 February 2021, worked the ancient river delta there for nearly four years, and drove up and out over the western rim in December 2024. It has been on the high ground outside ever since.
By March 2026 it had driven about 42 km, a little short of a marathon, and taken 27 rock cores, 25 of them sealed. Ten more tubes sit in a depot on the crater floor at a site called Three Forks, left there in January 2023 as a backup cache.
Those samples were drilled for a return mission. In January 2026 Congress declined to fund Mars Sample Return, and there is currently no approved spacecraft to go and collect them. The rover has carried on drilling.
The rocks it is working through now are the oldest it will reach. Some look like megabreccia, rubble thrown out when an impact excavated the Isidis basin roughly 3.9 billion years ago, which would make them older than Jezero crater itself and older than anything the mission was designed to sample.