Backside Solar Activity Report From Mars!

James Kaufman, World News Report Today: Backside Solar Activity Report from Mars The next two months, NASA's Perseverance rover will have an extra job. Solar Astronomer Mars is passing behind the sun at about 144 million miles away. This gives the rover a view of the sun's far side, allowing it to monitor sunspots we cannot see from Earth, if they're big enough. Here's the latest image from the Jezero crater on November 25th. Approximately once a day, Perseverance looks at the sun using its Mastcam-Z stereo mast-mounted camera. It does this to assess the amount of dust in the air, an important factor in Martian weather forecasting. It does this all year long. But being on the backside and being able to see the sunspots is a huge bonus. Mastcam-Z isn't designed for solar observation. It can only put about 90 pixels across the solar disk at 144 million miles from the sun. This means sunspots have to be very large to show up. This week, there's a very large sunspot indeed. Preserverance's images reveal a far-side behemoth about 15 Earth diameters wide. The sunspot will turn towards Earth next week, potentially bringing an increase in solar activity. Mars will be passing behind the sun for the rest of the month into December and even in January 2026. You can actually see other sunspots are showing up as well. So, stay tuned for more sunspot reports from the red planet. One instantly has to ask, if the Mars rover can see these sunspots from Mars 144 million miles away, why aren't there just a ton of ground-based cameras that also view the sun from Earth? I know that we have a lot of large telescopes, but that data is never available to the public. And the public is who pays for all that data to be compiled, period. God bless. Please share, subscribe, and always remember, anything's possible in Bizarro World.