NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera to capture the silhouette of Phobos, one of the two Martian moons, as it passed in front of the Sun on Sept. 30, 2024, the 1,285th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Perseverance has captured several Phobos transits since its landing at Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021.
The video shows the transit speeded up by four times, followed by the eclipse in real time. The reason for the odd appearance of Phobos is that the Martian moon is only 27 kilometers miles across at its largest dimension. It doesn’t produce enough of its own gravity to reform itself into a spherical shape (that requires a diameter of about 400 to 600 kilometers, depending on the material the astronomical object is made of).
The Mars Perseverance Rover is a pretty fascinating piece of technology. It was launched by NASA on July 30, 2020, and after a seven-month journey through space, it finally touched down on the Martian surface on February 18, 2021. The landing site, Jezero Crater, was chosen because it appears to have been a river delta, aeons ago. The area could even hold some clues about whether life once existed there.
Perseverance’s main mission is to search for signs that Mars was once habitable, especially for microorganisms. To do this, it’s equipped with an array of scientific tools—cameras, spectrometers, drills, and even ground-penetrating radar. If you look at its robotic arm, you’ll see instruments like SHERLOC (short for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals). SHERLOC’s job is to look closely at rocks and soil, basically scanning them to see if they contain organic materials—potential building blocks of life.
Unlike previous rovers, Perseverance has the ability to drill into rocks and store them in small, airtight tubes. The idea is that these tubes will be left on the Martian surface for a future mission to pick up and eventually bring back to Earth. It sounds like sci-fi, but scientists are excited about what we could learn from analyzing these samples here at home.
The MOXIE device aboard the rover is an experiment to see if we can produce oxygen from Mars’ carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. If it works, this technology could one day be scaled up to help provide oxygen for astronauts—or even for rocket fuel.
Then there’s Ingenuity, the little autonomous helicopter that Perseverence took with it on its interplanetary road trip. Initially, all they wanted out of it was to see if powered flight was even possible in the thin atmosphere of Mars. The atmosphere on Mars is only about 1% the density of Earth’s so It’s hard to fly anything there, but it did actually work. Since then, Ingenuity has gone on multiple flights and has even scouted ahead for Perseverance, helping to choose the best paths forward and highlighting interesting spots to investigate.
Perseverance is also sending back amazing photos—not just regular snapshots, but panoramic views of Martian landscapes and even close-up shots of rock formations that look like they belong in a sci-fi movie. It’s also got microphones on board, which means we can actually hear the Martian wind.
Unsurprisingly, it sounds about like you’d expect.
Looking ahead, Perseverance will keep exploring Jezero Crater, gathering more rock samples, and probing areas that look like they might have had water. Some of the rocks it’s drilled into already suggest the presence of minerals that form in wet environments, which adds to the evidence that Mars once had the conditions necessary for life—at least microbial life.
The real importance of Perseverance is not just what it’s doing now; it’s paving the way for future missions. One day, scientists hope to get those samples back to Earth. If all goes according to plan, a joint NASA and European Space Agency mission could bring them back in the 2030s. Imagine actually holding a piece of Mars and studying it directly—it could answer some of the biggest questions we have about our planetary neighbor.
For now, Perseverance keeps exploring, drilling, and listening to the alien wind sweep across the Martian surface. What Perseverance is doing could be the first chapter in humanity’s story of settling another planet—not just exploring it from afar, but actually understanding it in ways we never could before.
And sometimes—just for the heck of it—it, too, looks up into the night sky to see what wonders there might be.
