NASA has published an unusual image taken by the Perseverance rover. It shows the pre-dawn Mars.
The image was taken on March 1, 2025, on the 1433rd sol of Perseverance a few hours before sunrise. The image was obtained using the left Navcam. It consists of 16 separate images, each taken at an exposure time of 3.28 seconds.
Due to low light and high shutter speed, the final photo turned out to be quite “noisy”. Many of the white spots in the sky are not actually stars but image artifacts. Some may also have been caused by cosmic rays hitting the camera’s detectors.
Nevertheless, you can clearly see the pre-dawn Martian landscape in the image. As for the sky, you can see at least two stars, Regulus and Algieba, which are part of the constellation Leo. But the main “star” of the image is certainly Deimos, which literally dominates the Martian skyline.
Deimos is the smaller of the two Martian moons. It has an average diameter of 12.4 kilometers and orbits at an altitude of about 20,000 kilometers from the Martian surface. This is equivalent to half the distance to the geostationary satellites.
Because of this, the apparent size of Deimos in the Martian sky is relatively small. They are about 1/10 of the apparent size of the Sun, therefore the satellite will look more like a star to observers on the surface of the Red Planet. As for its brilliance, its apparent stellar magnitude is – 5.0. Thus, Deimos is only slightly brighter than Venus in the Earth’s sky.
Earlier we reported on how Perseverance photographed the aurora on Mars for the first time in history visible to the human eye.
According to NASA
