NASA has released footage of the clearest solar eclipse by a Martian moon ever recorded.
Captured by the Perseverance Mars rover, the 40-second recording shows Phobos, the largest of the two Martian moons, crossing between the rover location and the Sun.
The eclipse—sometimes called a transit because the apparent size of Phobos is much smaller than the disk of the Sun—was much shorter than a lunar eclipse on Earth, in part because Phobos is about 157 times smaller than Earth’s Moon and orbits at roughly 3.5 times the speed.
The first images of Phobos in a solar eclipse were captured by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. Curiosity likewise took images of transits in 2019.
But Perseverance, which landed in February 2021, has provided the closest and highest resolution video of a Phobos solar transit yet, thanks to Perseverance’s next-generation Mastcam-Z camera system, a significant upgrade from Curiosity’s.
“I knew it was going to be good, but I didn’t expect it to be this amazing,” said Rachel Howson of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, one of the Mastcam-Z team members who operate the camera.
The addition of color adds to the impact of the Perseverance video. “You can see details in the shape of Phobos’ shadow, like ridges and bumps on the moon’s landscape,” said Mark Lemmon, a planetary astronomer with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who has orchestrated most of the Phobos observations by Mars rovers. “You can also see sunspots. And it’s cool that you can see this eclipse exactly as the rover saw it from Mars.”