Bosnians watch Mars landing in crater named after village

Several dozen people, most of them youngsters, gathered in a school gym in western Bosnia Thursday night to watch NASA's rover land on Mars, bursting into applause at the confirmation that the Perseverance had touched down in a crater on the Red Planet named after their village.

Jezero villagers who watched the landing live in the gym of their community's only school said they were proud to share a connection with exploration of Mars, if only by name. Many residents of Jezero are hoping that the exploration of the Mars crater might inspire more attention and visitors to their own small patch of the universe, a verdant Bosnian valley adjacent to the beautiful, river-fed Pivsko Lake.

NASA informed local authorities in 2019 of its plans to name a 28-mile (45-kilometer) wide crater on Mars after the village of some 1,000 people because it was once home to a river-fed lake like the one just outside Jezero, whose name means "lake" in the local language.

The Jezero crater on Mars is filled with cliffs, pits, sand dunes and fields of rocks and could hold evidence of past life. The rover is expected to gather samples at the spot for eventual return to Earth. "It is very important that Jezero crater will be explored and that evidence of past life might be found there," said Dajana Gogic, a young resident of Jezero on Earth. 

(Image Credits: AP)