This Grainy Photo of Earth Captured on Mars Is Way Cooler Than It Looks

‘This composite of seven images from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows Earth, visible as a small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right, passing behind the Martian moon Phobos on July 2, 2026, 1,907th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.’

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z instrument to photograph Earth as it passed behind the Martian moon, Phobos.

The Mastcam-Z instrument is primarily designed to photograph things on Mars itself, rather than peer up into the sky at Earth, about 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away. Unsurprisingly, then, Perseverance’s composite photo of Earth is not exactly beautiful in and of itself. It’s really noisy, and given Earth’s distance, the planet is but a speck in the frame, not unlike Voyager 1’s legendary photo of Earth, “Pale Blue Dot.”

But behind the grain and relatively low visible resolution is something truly special. Perseverance’s new image is the first time Earth has been photographed hidden behind another astronomical object from the surface of another planet.

How NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) created the final image is interesting, too. Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z instrument captured a series of images for the final composite, showing Earth at different locations near and behind Phobos. The team then performed special image processing to make the background black, which “removed extraneous light in the background to enhance detail.”

The image below is a composite of nine images taken by Mastcam-Z on July 2, 2026, and the inset portion shows five images of Earth passing behind Phobos. The black rectangle shows the area that was imaged to see Earth, comprising a very small portion of the overall frame.

‘Annotated composite of nine images taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard Perseverance on July 2, 2026. The inset on the upper right, comprised of five images, shows Earth — the small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right — passing behind the Martian moon Phobos.’

Meanwhile, the image below shows annotations with the local solar time on Mars when each frame was taken.

This version includes annotations showing the local time on Mars at the time of photo capture.

In both cases, image processing has been performed to closely approximate the true color of the Martian sky during twilight when the images were captured. The photos were shot about 40 minutes after sunset on Mars, when the sky is blue-gray near the horizon and reddish-gray farther above.

It was just over 22 years ago that NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured the first ever photo of Earth from the surface of another planet. Unsurprisingly, Earth was mighty small in the photo back then, too.

The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this photo of Earth before sunrise on Mars in 2004.

10 years later, Curiosity delivered its own, arguably superior, take on a photo of Earth from Mars.

The Mars Curiosity rover captured this photo of Earth and the Moon in 2014.

Image creditsNASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI