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English: Mars' Moon Phobos Eclipses the Sun - viewed by Curiosity Rover, August 20, 2013. This video clip shows the larger of the two moons of Mars, Phobos, passing directly in front of the sun, in an eclipse photographed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity.
A transit of Phobos across the Sun as seen from Mars takes place when Phobos passes directly between the Sun and a point on the surface of Mars, obscuring a large part of the Sun's disc for an observer on Mars. During a transit, Phobos can be seen from Mars as a large black disc rapidly moving across the face of the Sun. At the same time, the ...
Mars’ other moon, Deimos, is even smaller.) The images are the latest in a long history of NASA spacecraft capturing solar eclipses on Mars. Back in 2004, the twin NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity took the first time-lapse photos of Phobos during a solar eclipse. Curiosity continued the trend with videos shot by its Mastcam camera system.
Both sets of findings support an origin of Phobos from material ejected by an impact on Mars that reaccreted in Martian orbit, [40] similar to the prevailing theory for the origin of Earth's moon. The moons of Mars may have started with a huge collision with a protoplanet one third the mass of Mars that formed a ring around Mars.
Observers on Mars can also view lunar eclipses of Phobos and Deimos. Phobos spends about an hour in Mars's shadow; for Deimos it is about two hours. Surprisingly, despite its orbit being nearly in the plane of Mars's equator and despite its very close distance to Mars, there are some occasions when Phobos escapes being eclipsed.
Limtoc is an impact crater on the surface of Mars's moon Phobos. [1] The crater, the diameter of which is 2 kilometers, is located within the larger and better-known Stickney crater. [1] Limtoc was officially named by the International Astronomical Union on 29 November 2006, after a character from Jonathan Swift’s 1726 satirical novel ...
[1] [2] The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles (300 km) away. [1] The HiRISE camera that was used to photograph the monolith has a resolution of approximately 1 foot or 30 centimeters per pixel. [3] Around the same time, the Phobos monolith made international news. [4]
Deimos (/ ˈ d aɪ m ə s /; systematic designation: Mars II) [11] is the smaller and outer of the two natural satellites of Mars, the other being Phobos. Deimos has a mean radius of 6.2 km (3.9 mi) and takes 30.3 hours to orbit Mars. [5] Deimos is 23,460 km (14,580 mi) from Mars, much farther than Mars's other moon, Phobos. [12]