People around the world enjoyed stellar views with last week’s total solar eclipse.
And the day after we looked up to see the moon obscuring out sun, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover looked up to see its own Martian solar eclipse.
What is it?
Solar eclipses aren’t unique to Earth. In theory, any planet with at least one orbiting moon would have times where that moon might eclipse some part of its sun to anyone looking up from the planet’s surface.
On Aug. 13, 2026, one day after Earth’s total solar eclipse in which our moon temporarily blocked out our sun for skywatchers in some locations, Mars saw its own solar eclipse.
Looking up with its left Mastcam-Z camera, Perseverance snapped this image of one of Mars’ two moons, Phobos and Deimos, partially eclipsing the sun. This appears to be Phobos — the larger of the pair — eclipsing the sun.
Why is it incredible?
So far, we humans have only directly had vantage points on Earth, in Earth orbit and on the moon. We have not yet landed humans on Mars, and it remains unclear how long it might be before that happens.
But robotic explorers like Perseverance allow us to travel where we can’t go ourselves. Such travelers have taken us into interstellar space and all throughout our solar system. From Saturn‘s rings to Neptune‘s distant, icy neighborhood, robotic probes have allowed humanity’s reach to stretch far through the cosmos.
And thanks to Perseverance and its two “eyes,” the two Mastcam-Z cameras located high on its mast, we can travel right to the surface of Mars, look up and see an alien solar eclipse. What an amazing thing that is.
