NASA’s Perseverance rover has captured an amazing solar eclipse seen from Mars: The video, which was posted a few hours ago on YouTube, shows a stunning definition of the solar disk crossing in less than a minute the dark shape of Phobos, the young moon of Mars with an irregular shape. The observation, carried out on April 2, will help to better determine the satellite’s orbit and how its gravity affects the Red Planet through the formation of its crust and mantle.
In the past, NASA has already been able to document another solar eclipse from Mars: in 2004, the “twin” rover Spirit and Opportunity photographed for the first time Phobos’ passage in front of the solar disk with time-lapse technology. Also later, Curiosity got into the enterprise using Mastcam. Equipped with a new generation of Mastcam, Perseverance was able to capture this phenomenon by producing a video with the largest number of frames and the highest zoom ratio. The new Mastcam-Z also has a filter that works like sunglasses to reduce the intensity of light. That way, “you can see details of Phobos’ outlines, like bumps and bulges,” notes Mark Lemon, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who has organized most of the Phobos observations by Mars rovers. “It’s also possible to see sunspots. It’s great that you can see the eclipse just as the probe saw it from Mars.”
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