The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft has captured a rare event in space thanks to its privileged position in Mars’ orbit.
The small spacecraft, located more than 100 million km (62 million miles) from Earth, was able, thanks to its presence at the right time and place, to monitor the moment the Mars moon, Deimos, the smallest moon of the red planet and the solar system, passed in front of Jupiter and its four largest moons. Galileo moons.
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Scientists say that celestial alignments like this allow for a more accurate determination of the orbits of Mars’ moons.
While observing the Red Planet, the Mars Express spacecraft captured the eclipse, when the distance between Mars and its giant neighbor, Jupiter, was estimated at 745 million km.
For a few brief moments, Deimos and the Invading Titan seemed to be one happy family.
On February 14, 2022, the alignment of these two astronomical objects was captured by the camera, in a series of 80 images brought together into a video clip.
“Such an alignment is highly unusual because Deimos must be exactly in the orbital plane of Jupiter’s moons for the alignment to occur,” the European Space Agency wrote in a statement.
The video shows the Mars moon Deimos, which is only 15 km long, slowly moving across the screen from left to right as it passes, obscuring the icy moon Europa and the giant moon Ganymede, which appear as two small points resembling stars in the dome of the sky as we see it from Earth, then the disk of a planet Buyer. It is followed by the volcanic moon Io. Finally, Callisto, Jupiter’s second largest moon.
These observations allowed Mars scientists to more accurately measure the position and orbit of Deimos, which is difficult to do from Earth, given that Mars’ moons are very small and faint. Understanding their orbits may be key to understanding where they come from.
It is unclear whether Deimos and the larger moon, Phobos, were ever part of a larger crashed body, or two passing asteroids pulled by Mars’ gravity.
Better characterization of the orbits of Mars’ moons will allow scientists to better model what will happen to them in the future, too.
Phobos is currently slowly heading towards Mars, so that scientists believe that within the next 100 million years it will be very close to Mars, and the gravity of good will tear the moon into small pieces, resulting in a temporary Phobos ring around the planet.
On the other hand, Deimos is slowly moving away from Mars. Scientists believe that if it continues in this direction, it will eventually escape the gravitational hold of Mars and make its own way through the large, vast solar system.