NASA recruits Mars Perseverance Rover to monitor Sun activity

NASA recruits Mars Perseverance Rover to monitor Sun activity

By Claire Cameron Edited by Jeanna Bryner

NASA designed its Mars rover Perseverance to help monitor the sun’s activity. Every day for the next two months, the rover will image the sun with its Mastcam-Z cameras, capturing crucial information about sunspots and other important features that can provide clues about solar activity.

Mars is currently passing behind the sun, giving the rover a view of the far side of the star, a perspective we can’t see from Earth. Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z, which consists of zoomable cameras attached to its mast, is not designed for solar monitoring; The rover points the system toward the sun once a day to measure dust in the Martian air, critical information for weather forecasting on the Red Planet. But it is sensitive enough to see large sunspots.

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This isn’t the first time NASA has recruited Perseverance as a solar observatory: the agency also used the rover to image sunspots in 2024.

Sunspots are temporary dark areas on the sun that occur when intense magnetic fields block heat from the sun’s interior. Concentrated in active regions, they can last for days or months and usually coincide with other phenomena such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. If these energetic blasts are aimed at Earth, they can cause auroras and even disruptions to satellite and radio systems.

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