The Perseverance rover captures a solar eclipse from the surface of the Red Planet

The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Perseverance rover continues to take impressive images and transmit them back to Earth. Late last month, the rover turned its Mastcam-Z camera toward the sky and was able to capture a solar eclipse as Phobos, one of Mars’ two moons, partially obscured the star. In a series of images taken on September 30, you can clearly see the outlines of Mars’ miniature satellite.

Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

The dimensions of Phobos are approximately 27 × 22 × 18 km and it rotates at an exceptionally close distance from the planet – only 6 thousand km. For comparison, the satellite of our planet the Moon is located at a distance of 384 thousand km from the Earth. Phobos rotates at high speed, managing to make three revolutions around Mars per day.

Although Phobos looks like an asteroid, it most likely is not one. In fact, the origin of the satellite is its main secret. Some scientists do not consider Phobos to be an asteroid that is under the gravitational pull of Mars for one main reason – its orbit around the planet is almost perfect. If Phobos were truly an asteroid that flew past and was caught in the gravitational pull, then most likely it would have the wrong orbit.

Modern theories of the origin of Phobos and Deimos, the second moon of Mars, revolve around suggestions that they were formed from material left over from the formation of the planet itself. Other scientists do not rule out that the Martian satellites were formed as a result of a collision of the planet with another space object.

As for the latest photos created by Perseverance, this is not the first time it was able to capture a solar eclipse. The rover first captured a solar eclipse from the surface of Mars in April 2022, and did so again in February 2024. Interestingly, Perseverance wasn’t even the first rover to capture images of the eclipse. The twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity observed the passage of Phobos against the background of the Sun back in 2004, and the Curiosity rover even recorded the eclipse on video in 2019.