Percy Images Confirm Jezero Crater as Ancient Lake

The first major analysis of images taken by NASA’s Perseverance rover reveal that Jezero crater is truly the site of an ancient lake, as predicted.

IMAGE: Caption:Images from the Perseverance rover confirm that Jezero crater is an ancient Martian lake, researchers say. This Mastcam-Z enhanced color photo mosaic shows a butte near Jezero crater informally dubbed “Kodiak” by the rover team. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/CNRS/ASU/MSSS

It feels like just yesterday that I spent several hours covering the landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars with my colleagues over at the SETI Institute. In fact, Percy touched down way back in February, over seven months ago. And at the same time, we’ve covered so many Percy stories and so much has happened in our lives since then, that it also feels like Perseverance has been on Mars for years. Funny how time works, isn’t it?

But while we’ve all been dealing with the wild reality in which we are living, the science has continued to flow, and now a first major analysis of images taken by Percy has been published in the journal Science. That analysis provides evidence that Jezero Crater, Percy’s landing site, really is the site of an ancient lake, as we hoped.

In case you have been living under one of the fascinating rocks Percy has been photographing, Mars once had water. Lots of water. And Jezero Crater used to be a lake. We thought this was the case from images taken by the spacecraft in orbit around Mars, but now that we have images from inside the crater…