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NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS
A filtered photo from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the Martian moon Phobos passing across the left edge of the sun. The raw photo has been enlarged to twice its original size.
NASA's Curiosity rover has caught sight of its first solar eclipse from the surface of Mars — a slight bite taken out of the sun by the Martian moon Phobos, as seen from the rover's vantage point in Gale Crater on Thursday.
Curiosity's Mastcam imaging system captured this image of the partial mini-eclipse through a neutral density filter that reduced the sunlight to a thousandth of its natural intensity. After all, you wouldn't want Curiosity to blow out its camera on Mars, any more than you would want to damage your own eyes by staring at the sun without eclipse-viewing glasses. The bright spots in the darkness surrounding the sun may look like stars, but Keri Bean, a member of Curiosity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me they're just "hot pixels" — flaws in the raw image data.
The rover was programmed to take hundreds of high-resolution images during the transit on Sol 37 of the mission, and eventually they could be transmitted and assembled into Curiosity's first eclipse movie. But that may take a while, due to the limited data-transmission bandwidth and the $2.5 billion mission's other priorities. Meanwhile, Curiosity has two more opportunities over the next couple of days to watch solar transits by Phobos and Mars' smaller moon, Deimos.
More about Martian moons and eclipses:
- Watch an eclipse and a sunset on Mars
- Deimos passes over sun while rover watches
- Martian moons seen together for first time
- Phobos takes the spotlight
Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
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That is so cool! I wonder how they faked it?
How about ask you're significant other. I'm sure they know all about faking it that is........if you have one. -_-
Back to the topic with common sense people.....clearly this is a teaser picture. Just enough yet not enough. I can patiently wait and save my excitement for the movie. I'm sure that will be just as great as seeing the photo the Spirit rover sent back of the Earth in the Martian sky for the first time. I still shake my head in awe at that picture.
Hey, I'm pretty sure Doug was just joking. :)
It is a cool photo, and it's only the beginning. When the rover team can get the rest of the images downloaded, the movie of the whole transit will be really cool. Plus, I'm guessing it could give some important info about the atmosphere, or about the Sun, or about Phobos.
COOL job Rover dudes! COOL article Alan! :)
This was a whole lot easier to fake than the Moon landing...
If you don't want to be serious then go away because you are not funny either.
That is a good picture, Willard. Have you seen the one where the orbiter snapped a shot of the rover on its decent? Truly amazing.
space.com/16946-mars-rover-landing-seen-from-space.html
Sigh...
I wondered how long the conspiracy theorists would make an appearance and comment on the lack of stars.
Looks like the very first post didn't disappoint me.
/sigh/
Doug is a satirist. His post above, and pretty much everything he posts, is satire. He is a master of the one-liner. It's usually funny and witty, and I always enjoy seeing his take on reality.
A very long time ago, Phobos got hungry after its long journey around Mars and took a small bit out of the sun. Later that day, and after some decidedly uncomfortable intestinal bloating and an epic case of heartburn, he farted partially digested sunlight out through his anal-prism (unique to deified Martian satellites)... and that's where rainbows come from!
Seriously though, congratulations to everyone who put this mission together. It is astounding to think that "we" have been able to put something like this down on another planet and have it send back data like this.
It's Skoll, devouring the Sun! Martian Ragnarok!!!
The same way that you're not real and typing over the internet, and 'somebody' is having us make-believe that you are.
A partial solar eclipse ... on another planet ... wickedly cool!
Now is a good time to be alive.
I agree, this is amazing.
Can't wait for the 'video' they piece together. Should be well worth the wait.
This is so cool! Congrats on another great accomplishment!
Yo, Rover. We're not paying you to sit around and stare dreamily at the sun all day. Get back to work!
A transit or just a bite?
:)
I want a "doule-star" pic of the Earth and Moon from Mars-I could not see the moon in the other one,and lets have a look at Jupiter and it's moons from Mars...perhaps Galileo would have had less trouble with the Pope if we had started out there ?
Since the dawn of man, the celestial nightly sphere has baffled, intrigued, tempted, frightened and awed us. As we have taken baby steps and grown in knowledge, its secrets have slowly been revealed. How incredible that in all the civilizations of people to gaze up in wonder from this planet, we are alive now to see such times! I hope people say a silent thanks to all who helped us get here. For they often paid a huge price for their efforts, integrity and discoveries. It would be awful if folks didn’t take advantage of this great historical period. Such a bright spot in these troubling days and a reminder to keep looking at the good things man can do.Curiosity truly is a gift to all of mankind.One could say,in a quirky kind of way, it's the first "intelligence" on another planet! And it is going where no man has gone before:)
That's really cool.
I always thought that one of the most interesting coincidences about the Earth is that, from our point of view, the sun and moon appear to be roughly the same size. Whole aspects of our shared culture and mythology are based on the idea of the Sun-Moon being a sort of pair, equal and opposite in the sky. What sort of mythology would arise on a planet where there were multiple moons, or they appeared much smaller or larger than the sun?
"I always thought that one of the most interesting coincidences about the Earth is that, from our point of view, the sun and moon appear to be roughly the same size."
And only at this era in Earth's total history. The Moon was once much closer to Earth, and continues to gradually (and I mean continental drift-scale gradually) move away, at the expense of Earth's rotation. One day only annular eclipses and transits will be possible, stopping when Earth also presents one face to the Moon.
After that, solar tidal effects will cause the process to reverse, until the Moon is close enough (Roche Limit) for tidal effects to break it up into a ring structure...it the system were left entirely to itself. However, IIRC, it will take 77 billion years to get to this point, and the Sun will have gone red giant well before then, likely making hash of everything at this distance from it.
I was going to post something similar, MSpielman. I also wonder at the mythology that would come out of seeing the Earth/Luna system from Mars. Imagine if Venus had a substantial satellite that would always appear with it?
Please, folks, note that Martian satellites are small. I keep seeing posts that we should set up a base on one of Mars' moons. Our moon would make a lot more sense.
I've always enjoyed this:
http://www.astrodigital.org/astronomy/emscale.html
MSpielman, I suspect something along the lines of what has already happened on ours would still result but with a more complicated cast of players. Though the sun is actually the dominant one, moon lesser in most ancient cultures, the sun seen as the King being reborn at the start of the new year, or the sun as the male role, moon female. The ritual of death and rebirth is pretty universal in almost every ancient culture to explain what happens to the sun at night and moon rising.I'd guess another planet's celestial events would have similiar associations. With social rituals and special events needing honoring. Their system to keep track of eclipses, and other regular solar events as part of those myths. The same thing is found in ancient cultures on earth.No doubt some awesome stories. I mean, can you image what an alien would think of our mythologies? Perhaps we'd be seen as complete idiots!
I'm amazed that NASA didn't have the foresight to spring for the unlimited data plan. Guess they didn't want to commit to the two-year contract.
Any plans to explore either of the moons?
Not sure about NASA but the Russians had the Phobos-Grunt mission which failed back in January – which was supposed to get samples from Phobos. Which was a shame considering that some scientists believe that the results of the 2008 Phobos Flyby show a third of the moon to be hollow. It could be that the Phobos is not a moon but an artificial structure.
Uh oh, now I am going to be classified as a conspiracy theorist, better stop now.
I'm surprised the rover hasn't found the WalMart or the Starbucks yet.
A full moon shot of Phobos over the Mars horizon would be even more interesting.
Phobos is a potato shaped satellite that is in retrograde around Mars. It was probably an asteroid that was captured by mars' gravity. What an incredible picture. An incredible achievement by NASA/JPL. Keep up the good work guys. The US doesnt have too much to be proud of these days, but stuff like this gives me hope --- I hope you find evidence for the existence of life on Mars. You deserve to be the first to discover it.
alinnj, may I offer a couple of minor corrections to your excellent post?
Phobos is not orbiting retrograde, but because it orbits Mars faster than a Martian day it APPEARS retrograde to an observer on the surface of Mars. (You can see the same kind of behaviour here on Earth by watching the International Space Station, which for an observer on the ground appears to rise in the west and set in the east, even tho it is orbiting the Earth in the same direction as our spin.) From space you would see that it orbits Mars in a prograde direction, like our own Moon and most of the other moons in our Solar System.
(Interestingly, Phobos is slowly spiraling into Mars, and in several million year will break apart and form a Martian ring.)
There is a of skepticism that Phobos & Deimos are captured asteroids; their orbits are too circular, and there is no known mechanism to circularize a captured asteroid. Other hypotheses are that they may have been part of a binary asteroid system, with its twin ejected (transferring the orbital momentum with that body), or that they are the accumulated "rubble piles" of debris from a very large asteroid impact in Mars' distant past (the idea I favour).
Cheers! ~Michael (Astronomy.FM★Radio)
I thought the tidal forces would tug at the satellite at the low point of its orbit, slowing it, thus reducing the excentricity with time.
Hope KStew and RPatz are not starring in it.