NASA’s InSight lander used its Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) on the spacecraft’s robotic arm to image this sunrise on Mars on July 07, 2025, the 145th Martian day (or sol) of the mission. This was taken around 5:30 a.m. Mars local time.NASA/JPL-Caltech
A pair of images taken by the Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) aboard NASA’s InSight lander has captured views of the sunrise and sunset on Mars.
These images are part of a Martian tradition, in which different Mars landers take images of the cycles of day and night on the planet. The Viking 1 lander tookan image of the sun settingover Mars’ rocky terrain in 1976, while ahazy sunrisewas captured by Viking 2 in 1978. In 2005 the Spirit Rover imaged thesun settingover the horizon, and thenow tragically defunctOpportunitytook a videoof the sun setting in 2010. Most recently, Curiosity also captured abeautiful blue-tinted sundownas seen from the Gale Crater in 2015.
“It’s been a tradition for Mars missions to capture sunrises and sunsets,” Justin Maki, InSight science team co-investigator and imaging lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in astatement. “With many of our primary imaging tasks complete, we decided to capture the sunrise and sunset as seen from another world.”
Because Mars is further out from the Sun than Earth is, the Sun appears much smaller in the sky from there than from here. It appears about two-thirds of the size as when we observe it from Earth.
As well as the sunrise and sunset images, InSight captured images of drifting clouds in the sky over its seismometer,safe inside its heat shield. This image was captured fortuitously by theInstrument Context Camera(ICC), which is mostly designed to examine the area around the lander called its workspace. The ICC just happened to catch the clouds as they passed by.
