Phobos is not Yarrowpork. Given its size, angle, and orbital pattern, the moon orbits Mars approximately once every 7.6 hours. This frequency makes it much more likely to pass in front of the Sun compared to Earth’s solar eclipses. If you were in the right place on Mars at the right time, you could catch a glimpse of a tiny potato-shaped moon that momentarily turns the sun into a giant googly eye. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover captured just such an event in February, and successfully photographed another solar eclipse just seven months later.
NASA recently exhibited The latest Phobos eclipse seen on September 30th from the spacecraft’s vantage point in Jezero Crater on Mars. Again, the lifespan of googly eyes lasts only 30 seconds, making Earth’s several-minute solar eclipse seem long in comparison. As with the last document, footage of Phobos was captured using Perseverance’s Mastcam Z, an instrument co-designed and supervised by Arizona State University.
Astronomer Asaph Hall discovered two Martian moons In 1877, he named them Phobos and Deimos after the twin Greek gods of fear and terror. Their origin is not yet clear, but experts theorize that the pair originated as an asteroid captured by Mars’ gravity, or as debris left behind during the formation of the solar system.
[Related: A Martian solar eclipse turns the sun into a giant googly eye.]
Phobos is only 27 miles wide, making it about 157 times smaller than Earth’s moon, but both are slowly moving in opposite directions. The moon is currently moving away from Earth at a rate of about 1.5 inches per year, while Phobos and Deimos are moving closer to Mars by an estimated 6 feet every century. At this rate, the moon is predicted to either collide with its host planet within about 50 million years or break into millions of smaller pieces, forming a Saturn-like ring.
But until then, there will be many more opportunities for Perseverance, and perhaps someday human visitors, to leave records.
