NASA's Perseverance rover captured Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, shining in the pre-dawn sky over the Red Planet on March 1, 2025.

Mars doesn’t have magnetic poles like Earth does, but that doesn’t stop the red planet from experiencing the night sky phenomenon known as the aurora. The Mars rover Perseverance made history by taking the first-ever photograph of an aurora from another planet, following a March 15 solar flare.

On March 15, 2024, near the peak of the current solar cycle, the sun produced a solar flare and an accompanying coronal mass ejection (CME), a massive explosion of gas and magnetic energy that carries with it large amounts of solar energetic particles.