• See a crescent moon in Martian sky

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

    The Martian moon Phobos shines faintly in a dusky sky, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    A fresh picture from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the Martian moon Phobos as it's never been seen before — as a crescent shining over the Red Planet at dusk.

    The image was captured by the rover's Mastcam imaging system last Friday, on the 45th Martian day of Curiosity's mission. You have to look closely to make out the faint, somewhat irregular crescent in the frame — just as you sometimes have to look closely to see our own moon's ghostly crescent in Earth's daytime skies.

    We've seen other views of Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons. But those mostly show the moon as seen by Red Planet orbiters, or as a silhouette during an eclipse. This is a rare photo (perhaps the first?) showing a crescent moon in a daylit Martian sky, as seen from the surface. It's the sort of spectacle that settlers could look forward to at sunset, decades from now.

    The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla provides further detail in her blog posting, plus further reflection: "Think about this for a moment — we're seeing a different moon from the surface of a different world. And this moon is weird not just for its lumpiness, but also because it orbits so close to Mars that it outpaces Mars' rotation. That means it rises in the west and sets in the east, more than twice every Martian day. Completely alien. And awesome, in the literal sense of the world."

    More awesomeness may be on the way on Thursday, when NASA has scheduled a televised news conference about the latest scientific findings from the $2.5 billion Curiosity mission. There are already reports that the rover has detected concrete-like material that hints at the past presence of water. That meshes with Curiosity's mission to trace the geological history of the Red Planet, and look for chemical evidence that Mars was once potentially habitable.

    What else will we find out? Stay tuned for Thursday's update. In the meantime, check out the pictures that are flooding through NASA's Mars Science Laboratory website and the MSL forum at UnmannedSpaceflight.com.

    Here are a couple of nice panoramas from Ken Kremer and Marco Di Lorenzo. One image is based on colorized imagery from Sol 29 (Sept. 4), and highlights the instrument-equipped turret on the rover's robotic arm. The black-and-white photo was assembled from data collected on Sol 44-47 (Sept. 20-23). In that 360-degree photo, the rock known as Jake Matijevic is just right of center stage. An inset photo shows Curiosity placing its robotic-arm turret on the rock.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

    A panoramic mosaic of Curiosity images from Sept. 4 shows the rover and its surroundings. Click on the image for a higher-resolution view.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

    A 360-degree panorama, stitched together from Curiosity images, shows the rover and its surroundings in the Sept. 20-23 time frame. Curiosity conducted its first contact-science experiments on a rock designated Jake Matijevic, which was named after a recently deceased member of the rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The overall panorama shows the rock named Jake just right of center, and an inset photograph shows the rover's instrument turret examining the rock. Click on the image to see a higher-resolution version.

    More views of Martian moons:

    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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  • Martian moon bites into the sun

    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.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    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:

    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.

  • Orbiter gets fresh 3-D look at Phobos

    G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

    The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe captured this stereo view of the Martian moon Phobos on Jan. 9. Some areas of the image have been adjusted to fix distortions or gaps for 3-D viewing using red-blue glasses.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter has snapped a fresh round of high-resolution images of the Martian moon Phobos, including a 3-D picture and a look at a yet-to-be-launched probe’s once and future landing site.

    Phobos, the bigger of Mars' two moons, is getting repeated once-overs by Mars Express' high-resolution camera in part because a good atlas is so important for the Russian-led Phobos-Grunt mission, now due for launch in November. The Russians plan to put a lander down on the ground ("Grunt" is Russian for "ground"), and the Mars Express imagery is helping refine their mission trajectory. Phobos-Grunt's lander is to collect rock and dust samples from the surface and send them back to Earth in a capsule.

    "With every Phobos image from the stereo camera, we can improve the three-dimensional model of the Martian moon," Jürgen Oberst of the German Aerospace Center's Institute of Planetary Research said Friday in an image advisory.

    G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA

    The ellipses on this image of Phobos show the previously planned landing area for the Phobos-Grunt mission in red, and the currently planned landing area in blue.

    These pictures were taken on Jan. 9 during Mars Express' last scheduled encounter with the 12-by-14-by-17-mile moon. The flyby brought the orbiter within an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) — so close that the camera had to turn at its maximum rate as it passed over Phobos.

    Phobos' characteristic grooves show up clearly in these photos — but it's not yet clear exactly what caused them. One hypothesis is that they're splat marks from debris that was kicked up by impacts on Mars. The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla explains the concept in this posting from an earlier Phobos flyby.

    More about Phobos:

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