Astronomy on Mars

Sped-up animation of Phobos moving in front of the Sun during the eclipse. Gif: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/SSI/GizmodoTypically, the Perseverance rover is looking down, scouring the Martian terrain for rocks that may reveal aspects of the planet’s ancient past. But over the last several weeks, the intrepid robot looked up and caught two remarkable views: solar eclipses on the Red Planet, as the moons Phobos and Deimos passed in front of the Sun.Why Bitcoin won’t reach $1,000,000Full solar eclipses don’t happen on Mars. The…

Image: NASA/JPL-CaltechCuriosity one-upped the Spirit rover by capturing a view of both Earth and the Moon, which it did on January 31, 2014. The image, captured by the NASA rover’s Mastcam, was taken around 80 minutes after sunset, at which point Earth was the brightest object in the sky. The Red Planet was 99 million miles (160 million kilometers) from Earth when the image was taken. Image: NASA/JPL-CaltechBy zooming in and adding some background darkness (see annotated image above), the Moon could also be seen. “A…

The sky is a hazy shade of—er, summer—on Mars, as captured in a new image by NASA’s Perseverance rover.Mars has four seasons, like Earth does, but they are a bit different from what we experience on our wet, life-filled planet. A Martian year is 687 Earth days, made up of 668 Mars sols, so its seasons last longer, too. They’re also more inconsistent than ours: In the Martian northern hemisphere, spring lasts 194 days, while autumn lasts only 142 days. Mars’ atmosphere is just 1% the density ofEarth’s, and the entire…

Two cameras on the Mars Express orbiter captured images of a series of dust storms near the Martian North Pole in 2019. Analysis of the images indicates that big clouds of dust on Mars formed similarly to water vapor clouds on Earth—an unintuitive finding, given how different the planets are.Most clouds on Earth are (obviously) not dust; they’re voluminous collections of cold water vapor. They form because of the water cycle and conditions of Earth’s atmosphere. Mars’ atmosphere is much colder than Earth’s and just 1% as…