Science Art: Geologic Map of Jezero Crater and the Nili Planum Region, Mars (Scientific Investigations Map 3464), by Vivian Sun and Kathryn Stack.

Scientific illustration of Jezero Crater and the Nili Planum on Mars, in the form of a detailed topographical map.
Scientific illustration of Jezero Crater and the Nili Planum on Mars, in the form of a detailed topographical map.

Scientific illustration of Jezero Crater and the Nili Planum on Mars, in the form of a detailed topographical map.Click to embiggen
This is a colorful map (literally called a mosaic!) of the area where Perseverance landed, only from a little higher up. You can see the pink semicircle of the crater, and inside the black circle, there’s the blue “fan unit 2” delta that spills onto Octavia E. Butler Landing out of the twisty, light-yellow canyon of the Neretva Vallis.

This kind of map is called a “CTX mosaic” because it’s pieced together out of hundreds of smaller snapshots taken by the Context Camera (CTX) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and then color-coded for geologic features. For instance, that blue “fan unit 2” was probably formed in what they call the Early Hesperian Era, when Mars was a wetter place 3.7 billion years ago, while the light yellow stuff at the bottom of the valley (not *actually* light yellow, of course) could date as late as the Late Amazonian Era, which is still going on now – with Mars as a desert planet without any surface water, and not much atmosphere to speak of. The US Geological Survey made the map to help NASA’s Mars rover (and helicopter!) decide where to go.

You can get the whole map with legend here at the USGS site.

Credit: Sun, V., and Stack, K., 2020, Geologic map of Jezero crater and the Nili Planum region, Mars: U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Map 3464, pamphlet 14 p., 1 sheet, scale 1:75,000, https://doi.org/10.3133/sim3464.