Stunning Mars Photo Shows Crater Where Mars 2020 Rover Will Land

NASA's Mars 2020 rover will kick off its journey to the Red Planet in July 2020, with an expected arrival date of February 2021. But where exactly will the rover touch down on Mars?

NASA recently released an image of the Jezero Crater, the target landing site of the Mars 2020 probe. The colored photo was obtained by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which often provides a glimpse of the locations where spacecraft will land.

The Jezero Crater shows evidence of having once contained liquid water. According to NASA's website, liquid water that flowed on the Red Planet during its early days formed channels and carried sediments, which eventually resulted to the fans and deltas in lake basins.

Using spectral data obtained by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists learned that sediments found within the Jerezo Crater delta contained clays and carbonates. These minerals are believed to be the result of the water chemically altering the sediments.

But before the Mars 2020 rover can reach Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, NASA still has quite a few kinks to iron out for their Mars mission. Earlier this month, the U.S. space agency released an image of the spacecraft that will bring the Mars 2020 rover to the Red Planet.

The spacecraft underwent a test in the Space Simulator Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, according to a report on NASA's website. While being tested in a 25-foot-wide, 85-foot-tall chamber, the Mars 2020 spacecraft was set in the same configuration that it will be flying in next year on its journey to Mars.

On May 24, NASA confirmed that the spacecraft has passed acoustic and thermal vacuum (TVAC) testing, which involved exposing the probe and its instruments to vacuum and extreme temperatures mimicking space's conditions.

"This is the most comprehensive stress test you can put a spacecraft through here on Earth," David Gruel, the Mars 2020 assembly, test and launch operations manager at JPL, said in a statement. "We flew in our simulated space environment for a week and a day, checking and rechecking the performance of every onboard system and subsystem. And everything looked great — which is a good thing, because next time this spacecraft stack hits a vacuum, it will be on its way to Mars for real."