How to get featured images of child pages?

I have a website that has several pages under the parent page of ‘Projects’. I would like the Projects page to automatically populate a list with the title, excerpt, and featured image of each project. I can do all of this with get_pages just fine, but don’t know how to properly fetch the featured image. Any hints?

Page in question: https://tinyurl.com/3wp2oeb

Code:

<ul id="projects">
<?php
   $projects = get_pages( array('sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'sort_order' => 'ASC', 'child_of' => 46) );  

   if (!$projects) {

      echo "problem";

   } else {

      foreach( $projects as $project ) { ?>
         <li>
         <img src="https://placehold.it/300x200" />
	 <h2><?php echo $project->post_title; ?></h2>
	 <p><?php echo $project->post_excerpt; ?></p>
	 </li>
   <?php }
   }
?>
</ul>