date of publication :
Wednesday
02:26 2022-11-23
NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft captured a solar eclipse, when the red planet’s moon, Phobos, intersected with the sun, obscuring part of the solar disk, according to CNET.
Space amateurs spotted the eclipse in preliminary images taken by the rover on November 18.
Planetary scientist Paul Byrne published the scene on his Twitter account, commenting: “This is a partial solar eclipse seen from the surface of Mars on Friday.”
Image processor Kevin Gill put the footage together into a short video clip, showing Phobos moving in front of the sun, giving us humans on Earth a good view of what the eclipse would look like from the surface of Mars.
Phobos is known as the moon closest to Mars among the two moons that revolve around the red planet, and the other moon is called Deimos.
Phobos’ surface is craters and grooves, 17 miles (27 kilometers) wide at its widest, and the moon orbits close to Mars in a relationship that could destroy it one day, millions of years from now.