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Can you find Deimos in this image from August 15, 2021? The NASA movie shows you where it is.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
This story is part of Welcome to mars, our series exploring the red planet.
On Earth, we just enjoyed a full moon. NASA’s Perseverance rover can also engage in celestial satellite observation on Mars, where it recently spotted the Red Planet’s little companion, Deimos.
NASA shared a short film of rover images taken while Perseverance took a time lapse to watch the clouds. The star of the show ended up being a little bright spot: Deimos.
Deimos is delicate and has an odd, lumpy shape. Mars has two moons (Phobos is the other), and Deimos, the crater, is the smaller of them just 9 miles (15 kilometers) at its widest.
“Watching the sky is fun, no matter where you are” the rover team tweeted on Friday.
Watching the sky is fun wherever you are. I took this short time lapse movie to watch the clouds, and I grabbed something else: look closely and you will see Deimos, one of the two moons of Mars.
More on this small moon: https://t.co/TzHMc0aIS3 pic.twitter.com/akfbhfsw33
– NASA Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) August 20, 2021
The observation of clouds is part of the scientific work of Perseverance in the Jezero crater. One of her main assignments is to look for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars, but she also studies geology, geography, and weather.
While Mars is known to be dusty and dry, it sometimes offers a nice cloudy action, like when NASA’s Curiosity rover spotted ‘pearl’ clouds in another region of the red planet. These are not the large, puffy, showy clouds that we often see on Earth. The clouds of Mars are quite subtle.
Perseverance recently marked six months on March with a celebratory Google Photos video. This latest moon-watching snapshot is worthy of the highlight reel.
Follow CNET’s 2021 space calendar to stay up to date with all the latest space news this year. You can even add it to your own Google Calendar.
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