This video shows Jezero crater, the landing site of the NASA Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on the Red Planet, based on images from ESA’s Mars Express mission. The planned landing area is marked with an orange ellipse.
Scheduled for the launch of Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30, 2020 aboard an Atlas V rocket, the Perseverance rover will land on February 18, 2021 in Jezero Crater.
An impact crater with a diameter of about 45 km, Jezero is located at the rim of the giant Isidis impact basin. Morphological evidence suggests that the crater once hosted a lake, some 3.5 billion years ago.
Jezero has an access and exit channel. The access channel is discharged into a delta fan reservoir, containing water-rich minerals such as tiny clays. Scientists, the lake has lived for a relatively long time because the delta would possibly have taken between 1 and 10 million years to succeed in its thickness and size. Other studies conclude that the lake has not experienced significant periods of fluctuations in the water point and has formed through uninterrupted surface runoff. This makes the Jezero crater a primary target for finding possible symptoms of microbial life, as biological molecules are very well preserved in river deltas and lake sediments.
Here you can get a recent examination of the ancient shores of the lake, minerals and the violent volcanism of the Jezero crater based on the knowledge of ESA’s Mars Express project: Mars Express is helping to uncover the secrets of the Perseverance landing site.
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