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Mars Rover Perseverance captures a partial eclipse by a moon. (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

One of the Martian moons travels between the rover and the sun. It's a bit different to my usual posts, and not my OC :).

I believe it's Phobos, so there might be doom music kicking in any second now...

Source: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/multimedia/raw-images/ZL7_1056_0760664099_781EBY_N0501254ZCAM01538_1100LMJ

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

That means someone at NASA made an effort to search for eclipse events on Mars visible by Perseverance and put the right wheels inside the organisation in motion so that they made the rover make a photo of the sun (and deimos). Nice.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

Very likely. Lots of super geeks on staff.

But it's also possible some astroenthusiast did the math and emailed it to NASA, and whoever got that endo thought it would be cool and passed it to someone who could schedule the instrument. If you think about your geekiest friend and how they’d react if you sent them something truly unique about their geekdom that they could act on - well, that’s pretty much how every engr/scientist at NASA would react.