An irregularly shaped spot appears at noon on the disk of a sick Sun. The Perseverance robot on Mars had the opportunity to record an eclipse that would never have been possible to see on Earth.
On April 2, NASA's nuclear-powered explorer turned his navigation camera into the sky as Phobos, one of Mars' two small moons, passed just in front of the Sun.
Phobos, a space rock with a diameter of 22 km and an irregular shape resembling a potato, is too small to cause a total eclipse even when the alignment is perfect.
In addition, the Martian eclipse lasted just 40 seconds, much less than a total solar eclipse on Earth.
"I knew it would be good, but I did not expect it to be so exciting," said Rachel Howson of Malin Space Science Systems, a team that operates Perseverance's navigation camera, excitedly, NASA said in a statement.
Eclipses have also been recorded from previous missions to Mars. The beginning was made in 2004 by the twin robots Spirit and Opportunity, which transmitted the first images. The first video was taken in 2019 by Curiosioty, the robot that confirmed that Mars was once a warm and humid planet.
Phobos and Deimos, the second and even smaller satellites of Mars, are estimated to be asteroids captured by the planet's gravitational field.
Images of eclipses will help planetologists better understand the trajectory of Phobos, which is on a declining path and is estimated to crash on Mars in a few tens of millions of years.
Research of this kind also explains how the gravitational pull of Phobos creates tidal phenomena in the subsoil of Mars and creates small deformations in the crust and mantle, the NASA announcement points out.
The video taken by Perseverance zooms in on the solar disk more than in previous images and also offers a faster image refresh rate.
The lens of the navigation camera is protected by a solar filter that works like sunglasses and reduces the brightness of the image.
As a result, one can even see sunspots.
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