An ancient lake — and the hunt for life.
Jezero is a ~45 km crater that once held a lake fed by a river. Its dried-up delta is one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of ancient life — which is exactly why NASA landed the Perseverance rover here in February 2021.
Claim your plot here →Billions of years ago a river flowed into Jezero, dumping mud and building a fan-shaped delta before filling the crater with a lake. On Earth, deltas are superb at trapping and preserving traces of life — so Jezero's layered sediments are prime territory for finding fossilized microbes, if they ever existed.
Perseverance is drilling and sealing rock cores here, leaving a cache for a future mission to bring back to Earth — the first-ever Mars Sample Return. Alongside it flew Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on another planet.