Mars rover Curiosity has sent back photographs of two asteroids, the first time an asteroid has been photographed from the surface of Mars.

“This imaging was part of an experiment checking the opacity of the atmosphere at night in Curiosity’s location on Mars, where water-ice clouds and hazes develop during this season,” said camera team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station. While the two Martian moons were the team’s main target, they chose a time when the asteroids would be in the shot.

The Curiosity rover is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration program. Designed to assess whether Mars was ever able to support living microbes, it has been analyzing soil and rock samples and sending reports and photographs back to Earth since it landed on the red planet in August 2012.

The asteroids photographed are Ceres and Vista, which orbit in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Both asteroids are part of NASA’s Dawn mission. Dawn orbited Ceres, the largest asteroid in its belt, in 2011 and 2012, and is now preparing to visit Vista, the third-largest asteroid in the belt.

The Dawn mission is an attempt to learn about the beginnings of our solar system by examining these two “protoplanets” whose growth was interrupted by the formation of Jupiter.

The Dawn mission to Ceres and Vista is just one small part of NASA’s asteroid research. An asteroid redirect plan is currently in the planning stages. This plan is an experiment to learn how we can deflect asteroid impacts on Earth. NASA will send a robotic spacecraft to capture a small asteroid or boulder off a larger asteroid and redirect it to orbit around the moon. If the operation is successful, astronauts will visit the asteroid in its new orbit to collect samples for study.