NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California built and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover for NASA.įor more information about the mission, go to. The High Resolution Stereo Camera was developed by a group with leadership at the Freie Universität Berlin. The European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, operates the ESA mission. While NASA's Mars rover Perseverance travels through space toward the Red Planet, its nearly identical rover twin is hard at work on Earth. Light color processing has been applied to highlight surface features. To prepare the Perseverance rover for its date with Mars, NASA's Mars 2020 mission team conducted a wide array of tests to help ensure a successful entry, descent and landing at the Red Planet.

The basemap image featured here was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Express orbiter. Scientists believe that these events likely created environments friendly to life. There is evidence of ancient river flow into Jezero, forming a lake that has long since been dry. Perseverance is the latest in a long line of Red Planet rovers to be named by school-age children, from Sojourner in 1997 to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, which landed on Mars in 2004, to Curiosity, which has been exploring Mars since 2012. A later, smaller impact created Jezero Crater within the Isidis impact basin. This event forever changed the rocks in and around the basin. Jezero Crater sits within the Isidis Planitia region of Mars, where an ancient asteroid or comet impact left behind a large basin some 750 miles (1200 kilometers) across. The crater was once filled with a lake several hundred feet deep. After nearly 300 million miles (470 million km), NASA’s Perseverance rover completes its journey to Mars on Feb. The rover was originally known as the Mars 2020 mission but it got its name in a nationwide contest, won by Alexander Mather, a seventh grade. The fan-like shape of the delta is visible in this image, as is the crater rim. Perseverance is set to land on Mars later today. The landing ellipse, measuring 4.8 miles by 4.1 miles (7.7 kilometers by 6.6 kilometers), places the rover at the site of an ancient river delta which could harbor signs of fossilized microbial life. See the clean version (no text annotations).

The white circle near the center of this image of Mars represents the location where NASA’s Perseverance rover is expected to land on Feb.

Perseverance mars landing