From the dusty plains of Jezero Crater on Mars, NASA's Perseverance rover turned its camera skyward and watched Earth blink out of sight behind Phobos, one of the Red Planet's two lumpy moons. The transit, recorded on February 18, 2026, marks the first time the rover has captured its home planet vanishing behind a Martian moon. The sequence shows Earth as a tiny bright dot, shrinking to nothing as Phobos, a 17-mile-wide rock, slides across the solar disk.
A Tiny Dot, A Big Moment
The images were taken with Perseverance's Mastcam-Z camera, a pair of zoomable science cameras mounted on the rover's mast. Over about 30 seconds, the camera snapped 13 frames as Phobos crossed in front of the Sun. In the final frames, Earth is gone, hidden behind the moon's irregular, cratered silhouette. The rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California processed the images into a short video, which also shows a sunspot rotating into view.
Why This Transit Matters to the People Who Track It
For the scientists and engineers who operate Perseverance, this was more than a pretty picture. Watching Phobos pass in front of the Sun helps them refine their understanding of the moon's orbit, which changes slowly over time. Phobos is spiraling inward toward Mars, and scientists predict it will eventually break apart or crash into the planet in tens of millions of years. Each transit gives them a precise measurement of where Phobos is and how fast it is moving.
The rover has captured Phobos transits before, but this is the first time Earth was also in the frame. The team had to calculate the exact timing and pointing direction to catch both the moon and the distant planet in the same shot. The effort paid off with a sequence that reminds viewers how small and fragile Earth looks from 140 million miles away.
A View From Another World
Perseverance has been exploring Mars since landing in February 2021, collecting rock samples and searching for signs of ancient microbial life. Its cameras have sent back stunning panoramas of the Martian landscape, but this particular image carries a different weight. It shows Earth not as a bright blue marble, but as a faint speck, barely visible against the glare of the Sun. The transit lasted only a few seconds, but the image will linger.
The rover's team shared the images with the public, noting that the event was visible only from Perseverance's vantage point. No other spacecraft on Mars captured the same view. For a moment, the rover on another planet became the only witness to Earth's brief disappearance, a quiet reminder of how vast the solar system is and how small our world appears from beyond.
