NASA Recruits Mars Perseverance Rover to Monitor Sun’s Activity

Mars is passing behind the sun, giving NASA's Perseverance rover a view of the star’s far side

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanna Bryner

NASA's Mars Perseverance rover looks at the sun on November 25. — NASA/JPL-CalTech

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NASA has drafted 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 large features that can give clues to solar activity.

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

The sun as imaged by NASA's Mars Perseverance rover on November 25. — NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

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This is not 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 out heat from the interior of the sun. Concentrated in active regions, they can last days or months and typically coincide with other phenomena such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. If these energetic explosions are pointed toward Earth, they can cause auroras and even disruptions to satellite and radio systems.

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Jeanna Bryner, Editor in Chief, Scientific American