NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured new images of a mystery gleaming in the Martian skies as dawn approached over the Red Planet earlier this year.
The images, captured shortly before 4:30 a.m. on March 1, 2025, revealed what NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab called “a hauntingly beautiful glimpse” of the planet’s mysterious moon Deimos, in long-exposure composite imagery.
The stunning view was assembled from 16 images of the otherwise faintly glowing moon as it rose in the Martian pre-dawn sky. While the long-exposure images reveal a relatively clear look at the sky and surrounding landscape, visible conditions were almost entirely dark when Perseverance captured the photos.
The Deimos Mystery
Part of what fascinates scientists about Deimos is the debate over how it became one of the Red Planet’s moons.
A range of theories have proposed origin stories for the curious natural satellite, including the idea that it is an asteroid that became captured in orbit around Mars or that it may have accompanied the planet for much longer, having originated alongside the planet.
Another possibility is that Deimos could have once been part of Mars but was dislodged during a massive meteor impact. This impact could have generated enough force to dislodge the object, which then took up residence in the Martian atmosphere.
Some planetary scientists also consider whether Deimos could be one of the larger remnants left over from a protoplanetary disk that once encircled Mars. New observations of distant exoplanets offer clues about how they form from these swirling circumstellar disks.
Initially discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall, Deimos is one of the smallest known moons in the solar system, clocking in at just 7.5 miles (about 12 kilometers) in width. It is also smaller than its sibling, Phobos, which has also been the subject of speculation by scientists for many odd characteristics.
Also like its sibling, Deimos has an irregular shape, which may support the asteroid theory of its origin. The moon currently orbits approximately 14,600 miles (23,500 kilometers) above the Red Planet, completing each of its orbits in about 30 hours.
Capturing a Martian Enigma
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the image using its left navigation camera, with each snapshot in the sequence of 16 images lasting approximately 3.28 seconds.
The composite image was assembled on board the rover before it was dispatched back to the Perseverance team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The final image comprises a 52-second total exposure.
The photo shows digital “noise” in the form of pixelation and a light, hazy appearance resulting from the low-light conditions before Martian dawn. Although several other small points of brightness appear throughout the photo, only two of them—the stars Regulus and Algieba in the Leo constellation—are likely to be celestial bodies.
Apart from camera artifacts from the low-light conditions at the time the photo was taken, JPL scientists considered whether some of the points of light seen in the photo could also be evidence of cosmic rays, which might have been revealed through the long exposure times in the images collected by Perseverance.
You can learn more about Perseverance and its ongoing mission on Mars at NASA’s official webpage for the rover’s explorations, with more than 830,000 additional raw images it has captured made available here.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.