2024-09-28 18:05:33
Mars has the moon that orbits closest to a planet, and its eclipses last just a few seconds
Mars has two small moons called Phobos and Deimos. Their apparent size is not large enough to cover the Sun, so Martian eclipses are never total, but their shape is so strange that they do not appear annular either.
Phobos and its fast eclipses
With a radius of 11 km, Phobos is the largest moon of Mars. It orbits the red planet at 6,000 km away, closer than any other known natural satellite, and that is why it is doomed to crash into the planet in a few million years.
Phobos takes 7 hours and 39 minutes to orbit Mars. Since a Martian day lasts 24 hours and 37 minutes, it rises and sets twice a day, and can produce two eclipses per Martian day. At the same time, its passage is so fast that its eclipses last no more than thirty seconds for a Martian observer.
When Phobos passes between the Sun and Mars, its irregular shape covers a good part of the solar disk, but since it does not cover it completely, its eclipses are called transits. Phobos transits occur somewhere on Mars most days of the Martian year (but never at its highest latitudes).
These rapid events cast a long shadow on the surface of Mars. The shadow cannot be seen from Earth, but we have observed it on numerous occasions with space probes and Martian rovers.
Already in the 1970s, NASA’s Viking I probe detected a dimming of light caused by the shadow of Phobos. And in the 90s, Mars Global Surveyor photographed its shadow in detail.
Fuente: XAKATA