Perseverance Mars Rover Spies Big Sunspot Rotating Toward Earth

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a new perspective on sunspots (those dark, cool areas where the sun's magnetic field is particularly strong, and which often launch solar flares). "NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has given us a sneak peek of an intriguing patch of the sun that's not yet visible from Earth," reports Space.com:Perseverance photographs the sun daily with its Mastcam-Z camera system to gauge the amount of dust in the Martian atmosphere. Such an effort captured a big sunspot moving across the solar disk late last week and over the weekend, as SpaceWeather.com reported. "Because Mars is orbiting over the far side of the sun, Perseverance can see approaching sunspots more than a week before we do," SpaceWeather.com wrote in a post highlighting the sunspot photos. "Consider this your one-week warning: A big sunspot is coming...." Solar flares and coronal mass ejections that hit Earth can affect satellite navigation and disrupt power grids, among other things, so tracking the movement of sunspots is more than just of academic interest.

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