Perseverance Mars rover spies big sunspot rotating toward Earth (photos)

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall published about 3 hours ago
A few days from now, the sunspot should be visible from our planet.



Image of the yellow solar disk against a black sky, captured from afar.
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover captured this image of a sunspot (bottom center of solar disk) on Aug. 20, 2023. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth.

Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big 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 more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming."



NASA's Perseverance Mars rover captured this image of several sunspots on Aug. 17, 2023. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)

Sunspots are relatively dark and cool areas where the sun's magnetic field is particularly strong.

These patches commonly serve as 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 known as "active regions."

More:
https://www.space.com/perseverance-mars-rover-sunspot-photos