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Watching eclipses from the surface of another planet, as shown by these new videos captured by NASA's Curiosity robot, has something sublime.
Mars has two small, odd-shaped moons. Phobos is the largest, 27 km in diameter, while Deimos is only 14 miles (14.5 km) in diameter. With the help of his Mastcam, Curiosity recently captured the moons passing in front of the Sun. The NASA rover has done it before, but these new Eclipse images, released yesterday by NASA, are some of the best we've seen so far.
The eclipse of Phobos was captured on March 26, 2019. The event is considered an annular eclipse because the moon does not completely hide the disk of the Sun. The eclipse of Deimos took place on March 17, 2019. Technically, it is not an eclipse due to the small size of the moon and the low coverage of the sun. It is more of a transit, similar to the way distant exoplanets cross their host star and are then spotted from our terrestrial point of view.
A third series of images taken by the Navcam of Curiosity shows the shadow of Phobos crossing the sun on March 25, 2019, which temporarily attenuated the Martian daylight.
Mark Lemmon of Texas A & M University, co-investigator of the Curiosity Mastcam project, said such observations improve our understanding of the location of these moons relative to Mars. Fifteen years ago, before the Spirit and Opportunity missions, the alleged location of Deimos was 40 km away, according to a NASA press release.
"More observations over time help to pin down the details of each orbit," Lemmon said in the NASA press release. "These orbits change all the time in response to the gravitational pull of Mars, Jupiter or even each Martian moon pulling on each other."
These eclipses are important for science and they are undeniably impressive, but as bad astronomer Phil Plait said in 2012, they are actually quite common.
Phobos is in orbit around Mars, about 6,000 km above its surface – compare it to the 400,000 km from Earth to the Moon! Phobos is so close that it travels almost daily with the Sun to go somewhere on Mars, making it a less than rare event.
It does not stop to see how cool it is to see an eclipse of another world through the eyes of a fearless rover.
[NASA]
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