Image copyright NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS/BROWN UNIVERSITY Image caption Jezero Crater shows strong evidence from orbit of past water activity

The American space agency (Nasa) says it will send its 2020 Mars rover to a location known as Jezero Crater. “But what was once out of reach is now conceivable, thanks to the 2020 engineering team and advances in Mars entry, descent and landing technologies.”

When the landing site search began, mission engineers already had refined the landing system such that they were able to reduce the Mars 2020 landing zone to an area 50 percent smaller than that for the landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover at Gale Crater in 2012. NASA has chosen Jezero Crater delta, where the sediments contain clays and carbonates, as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 Rover mission, the US space agency said. “The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with land forms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement on Monday. “Getting samples from this unique area will revolutionize how we think about Mars and its ability to harbor life.”

Jezereo first piqued scientific interest in 2005, when two channels of an ancient lake were identified in the region by then-grad student Caleb Fasset of Brown, now a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. As NASA points out, the lake-delta system at Jezero Crater “could have collected and preserved ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into the crater billions of years ago.” The rover will collect several soil and rock samples and store them in a cache on the Martian surface for later pick-up by a future Mars mission. Another plus for the Mars 2020 mission is that Jezero Crater is located in one of the “oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer” — Isidis Planitia, a massive plain just north of the Martian equator. Modeled after NASA's hugely successful Curiosity rover, which landed in Gale Crater in August 2012, the Mars 2020 rover will weigh roughly the same, about one ton, feature the same nuclear power pack and use the same dramatic "sky crane" entry, descent and landing system in which a rocket-powered carrier lowers the rover to the surface on a tether.
NASA selects Jezero crater on Mars as the landing site for the Mars 2020 rover. The crater was once a large lake and may hold evidence of ancient life.