Mars rovers have been exploring the surface of the Red Planet for years now, and they have sent back some truly remarkable information. At first, these rovers would be solar and battery powered, which meant that they did all their work during the daylight hours.

NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in August 2012, has a nuclear power source. This means that it can operate day and night. The newer Perseverance rover also has a nuclear power source.

This is important because there are some advantages to working at night while on Mars. The first, and more obvious, is that NASA can get more work done running day and night. Avoiding long breaks means much more productivity.

For the Curiosity rover, a benefit is that it has an LED light on one of its arms. At night, it can use this light to shine into holes that it had drilled, which illuminates them in ways that aren’t possible during the day.

When the hole is cleared of debris, the Curiosity can shine its light into it and take images that show layers of rock and other information that scientists back home are interested in.

Another really cool thing that operating at night does is it allows the rover to take images out into space with no light pollution. The Perseverance rover did this in May of 2025 and caught the first images of a visible light aurora on the surface of Mars.

The pictures it produced aren’t nearly as intense as those you see on Earth, but it is the first time a land-based image of an aurora was ever taken on another planet, which is quite an accomplishment. Dr. Elise Wright Knutsen from the University of Oslo explained this, saying:

“For the first time ever, visible aurora has been observed on Mars. It was observed using two instruments on the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, the SuperCam spectrometer and the Mastcam-Z camera.”

Another amazing shot of the night sky took place more recently. The Perseverance took images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passed by in October of 2025. At the time, it was about 30 million kilometers (18.6 million miles) from the surface of Mars.

You can barely see the comet, but again, this is a first for humans to see a comet from another planet. You can see that image below with the comet being just a blur in the center of the cursor.

Keep in mind that the cameras on these rovers are designed to take images on Mars, not out in space. So, while the quality may not be great, it is not dissimilar to the earliest astrophotography on Earth.

Perhaps in the future, a rover or other mission will place a telescope designed to look out into the cosmos from Mars, at which point there would undoubtedly be some incredible pictures taken.

It is clear that working at night is opening up many amazing possibilities for the rovers on Mars and any future equipment (or even people) who are sent there.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a second giant hole has opened up on the sun’s surface. Here’s what it means.