The Jezero crater — a dry, wind-scoured patch of Martian rock where the rover touched down in February — was once a lake bed fed by an ancient river with floods so powerful they could move boulders, scientists say. .

“There were rushing rivers here,” Katie Stack Morgan, a deputy project scientist of the Mars 2020 project and an author of the paper, said of Jezero’s landscape some 3.5 million years ago.

“What you think you’re seeing from orbit around Mars may not be what you see when you get into the crater at eye level,” Stack Morgan said

The images also gave scientists, including the 39 authors of the Science paper, the ability to further analyze the layers of a rock on an outcropping called Kodiak

Stack Morgan said it’s exciting to know with certainty the rover will visit and collect samples from an ancient lake that was fed by a river

The rover also should be able to reach and sample portions of ancient lake beds, which are “exactly the kind of beds on earth that are great for organic material and biosignatures," she said