Residents of a small village in Bosnia gathered in front of a screen in the yard of their community's only school to watch NASA's Mars Perseverance rover attempt a difficult landing on Thursday in a crater named after their village.

The U.S. space agency's hazardous rover landing in the Jezero Crater is a critical part of its two-year, $2.7 billion, Mars 2020 mission to find signs of past life on the 'Red Planet.'

But it's also a historic day for the 1,100 villagers, who hope the landing of the Perseverance rover will also bring them some earthly rewards.

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Some are voicing feelings of pride, something rare amid the hardship and poverty that remains entrenched since the Bosnian war of the 1990s.

"When I first heard on TV that NASA named a crater on Mars after Jezero, I was surprised and I thought, 'something good is finally happening to us, after years of hardship, maybe this is a sign we can finally move forward,'" Milan Kontanjac, a Jezero villager, told AP.

"It is very important for our municipality, for our people," he added.

The Jezero Crater on the Red Planet was named by the International Astronomical Union after the village in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2007.

That's because the 45 km-wide crater was once home to a river-fed lake, like the Veliko Plivsko Lake just outside Jezero – the village's name means "lake" in the local language.

In 2018, NASA announced it had chosen the Jezero Crater as the landing site for its Mars 2020 mission.

The news was personally delivered to the village in September 2019 by the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia, who presented the mayor with a letter from NASA's director of Mars exploration honoring the connection between the village and the Red Planet.

"It is really good, it is good for promotion of Jezero, good that people are hearing about this small municipality," Mayor Snezana Ruzicic said.

Ruzicic added that she hoped the new fame will allow the area to develop projects, such as youth camps for children from across the still ethnically divided country, possibly even some devoted to space exploration.

"I am sure that in the future it could inspire some good [local] projects, good events in the municipality of Jezero," she said.

While the closest the villagers can get to the Martian Jezero is watching the rover landing on TV, many are hoping exploration of the Mars crater may attract more attention and visitors to their own region, which lies in a verdant Bosnian valley.

Video editor: Natalia Luz