There are not any Martians round to look at eclipses on Mars. However there are robots.
NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover lately noticed the desert planet’s misshapen moon, Phobos, traversing the solar. The area company’s car-sized robotic used cameras atop its mast β which act like a crow’s nest aboard a ship β to seize the picture beneath on Feb. 8. It was the rover’s 1,056th Martian day, or Sol, exploring the Crimson Planet.
You possibly can spy the oddly-shaped satellite tv for pc partially eclipsing our star because the moon strikes between Mars and the solar. The background is a canvas of distant stars.
Right here on Earth, we will witness numerous completely different photo voltaic eclipses, together with the looming complete photo voltaic eclipse, a uncommon celestial occasion taking place on April 8, 2024. For these within the “path of totality,” the moon will fully block out the solar for some three to over 4 minutes.
Our moon is sort of spherical, however Phobos is not almost. It is comparatively small and never too huge, with its longest facet measuring simply 17 miles (27 kilometers) lengthy. “Phobos is just too mild for gravity to make it spherical,” the European House Company explains. What’s extra, it has been hit time and time once more by potent area rocks. “Phobos was almost shattered by an enormous influence, and has gouges from 1000’s of meteorite impacts,” NASA famous. The evident influence web site is Stickney crater, which is 5.6 miles (9 kilometers) extensive.
Phobos will not be a moon without end. Yearly, it strikes some six ft (1.8 meters) nearer to the Crimson Planet. “At that fee, the moon will both crash into Mars in 50 million years or break up into a hoop,” NASA defined.
When not stargazing, the area company’s Perseverance rover, which expertly landed on Mars in February 2021, makes use of its specialised cameras to discover a dried-up river delta in Mars’ Jezero Crater. Some 3 billion years in the past, NASA’s planetary scientists suspect this space was full of water.
“This delta is likely one of the finest places on Mars for the rover to search for indicators of previous microscopic life,” NASA mentioned.
