Outside our blue skies, our solar system does its best at every hour of the day, all year round. And sometimes – if we’re in the right place at the right time – we can see these picturesque events from a new perspective.
More recently, it was the Mars Express probe. [Mars Express]The European Space Agency, which monitors Mars more than 100 million kilometers from Earth, at the right time and place, captured an eclipse that included Mars’ smaller moon Deimos andBuyer With its four Galilean moons (following the great astronomer Galileo).
At the time, the distance between Mars and its giant neighbor was regarding 745 million kilometers, but Deimos and Jupiter and its moons seemed like one happy family for a few moments.
On February 14, 2022, a camera aligned these astronomical objects were captured in a series of 80 images brought together into film.
“This alignment is extremely rare because Deimos must be exactly in the orbital plane of Jupiter’s moons for the alignment to occur,” the European Space Agency wrote in a statement.
The video shows Deimos, who is only 15 kilometers long, slowly moving across the screen from left to right. As it passes, it obscures the icy moon Europa and the giant moon Ganymede, which appear as small star-like dots, then obscures Jupiter’s disk, followed by the volcanic moon Io, and finally Callisto, Jupiter’s second moon.
This observation allowed Mars scientists to more accurately measure the position and orbit of Deimos, which is difficult to achieve from Earth, given that Mars’ two moons are so small and faint. Understanding their orbits may be key to understanding where they came from, as it is not clear if both Deimos and the larger moon Phobos were once part of a larger body that crashed, or a passing asteroid caught in the gravity of Mars.
A more accurate description of their orbits will allow scientists to better model what will happen to the two Mars moons in the future as well, as Phobos is currently slowly heading towards Mars, and scientists believe that during the next 100 million years it will be very close to Mars, and its gravity will cause the moon to break into small pieces, resulting in a ring temporary around the planet.
On the other hand, Deimos is slowly moving away from Mars. And if it continues in this direction, scientists think it will eventually escape Mars’ gravitational pull and make its way into the vast solar system.
nothing lasts forever. Not even the relationship between a planet and its moons.
Science Alert
