PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has chosen Jezero Crater as the landing site for its upcoming Mars 2020 rover mission after a five-year search, during which details of more than 60 candidate locations on the Red Planet were scrutinized and debated by the mission team and the planetary science community.
The rover mission is scheduled to launch in July 2020 as NASA's next step in exploration of the Red Planet. It will not only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions - and past microbial life - but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples and store them in a cache on the planet's surface. NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are studying future mission concepts to retrieve the samples and return them to Earth, so this landing site sets the stage for the next decade of Mars exploration.
According to Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the site has landforms that are 3.6 billion years old, enabling scientists to study Mars' planetary evolution and astrobiology.
Jezero Crater is located on the western edge of Isidis Planitia, a giant impact basin just north of the Martian equator. Western Isidis presents some of the oldest and most scientifically interesting landscapes Mars has to offer. Mission scientists believe the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) crater, once home to an ancient river delta, 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.
Jezero Crater's ancient lake-delta system offers many promising sampling targets of at least five kinds of rock, including clays and carbonates that have high potential to preserve signatures of past life. In addition, the material carried into the delta from a large watershed may contain a wide variety of minerals from inside and outside the crater.
The geologic diversity that makes Jezero so appealing to Mars 2020 scientists also makes it a challenge for the team's entry, descent and landing (EDL) engineers. Along with the massive nearby river delta and small crater impacts, the site contains numerous boulders and rocks to the east, cliffs to the west and depressions filled with aeolian bedforms (wind-derived ripples in sand that could trap a rover) in several locations.
Despite funding constraints, NASA's Mars Exploration Program continues to develop and launch missions to the Red Planet. The Mars 2020 Rover is the latest. NASA also intends to launch an orbiter to Mars in 2022 to maintain communications links between systems on the ground and Earth. After the Mars 2022 Orbiter launches, NASA will focus on building a sample return vehicle to collect the samples that the Mars 2020 Rover will leave behind.
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