NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that is not yet visible from Earth.
Perseverance photographs the sun day by day with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the quantity of dust within the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured an enormous sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported.
“Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots greater than every week before we do,” SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. “Consider this your one-week warning: A giant sunspot is coming.”
Related: Perseverance rover captures gorgeous video of solar eclipse on Mars
Sunspots are relatively dark and funky areas where the sun’s magnetic field is especially strong.
These patches commonly function launch pads for solar flares (outbursts of high-energy radiation) and coronal mass ejections (CMEs; huge eruptions of solar plasma), which is why they’re also generally known as “energetic regions.”
Solar flares and CMEs that hit Earth can affect satellite navigation and disrupt power grids, amongst other things, so tracking the movement of sunspots is greater than just of educational interest.
Sungazing is a sidelight for Perseverance, in fact. The rover’s foremost tasks are attempting to find evidence of life on Mars and collecting dozens of samples, which will probably be returned to Earth sometime in the following decade by a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission campaign (provided funding for the endeavor comes through).
Perseverance is exploring the ground of Mars’ Jezero Crater, which hosted an enormous lake and a river delta billions of years ago. The car-sized rover landed contained in the 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) crater in February 2021 together with the tiny Ingenuity helicopter.
Ingenuity was designed as a technology demonstrator, but has surpassed expectations to develop into something far more. It’s now serving as a scout for the Perseverance team and has a whopping 55 Red Planet flights under its belt.