QUOTE (centsworth_II @ May 6 2021, 02:53 AM)
Hopefully! Curiosity, Perseverance's older sibling, is coming up on 9 years and still going strong. From the description in the video, the area they will be spending "several hundred sols" in may be even better suited than the delta for finding biological signatures.
I do think it is a good idea to spend extended time out here since two years seemed very conservative, and chances are that once the rover leaves the area it will never come back. The location is very interesting due to a quieter depositional environment in the possibly shallow lake, proximity to a contact between mappable geological units, and the early observations of a diversity of rock types.
There are also groups which are very interested to visit the area just west outside of the crater which was scheduled for the second year, I believe. So it will be interesting to see if the several hundred days here in the outer delta, lake bottom area, will affect the time available at the actual delta remnants. I cannot really imagine it would but perhaps some kind of agreement between groups was necessary.