Outside of our blue skies, our solar system does its best at any time of day, all year round. And sometimes, if we are 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 (from the great astronomer Galileo).
At the time, the distance between Mars and its giant neighbor was about 745 million kilometers, but Deimos, Jupiter, and its moons looked like a happy family for a few moments.
On February 14, 2022, an aligned camera, these astronomical objects were captured in a series of 80 images combined into a film.
“This alignment is extremely rare because Deimos must be exactly in the orbital plane of Jupiter’s moons for alignment to occur,” the European Space Agency wrote in a statement.
The video shows Deimos, 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-shaped dots, then obscures the disk of Jupiter, followed by the volcanic moon Io and finally Callisto, Jupiter’s second moon.
This observation allowed Mars scientists to more accurately measure Deimos ‘position and orbit, which is difficult to obtain from Earth, given that Mars’ two moons are so small and faint. Understanding their orbits could be the key to understanding where they came from, as it’s unclear whether both Deimos and the larger moon Phobos were once part of a crashed larger body or a passing asteroid captured by Mars gravity. .
A more accurate description of their orbits will allow scientists to better model what will also happen to Mars’ two moons in the future, as Phobos is currently slowly making its way to Mars and scientists believe it will be very close to Mars over the next 100 million years. and its gravity will cause the moon to break into small pieces, resulting in a temporary ring 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 the gravitational pull of Mars and make its way into the vast solar system.
nothing lasts forever. Not even the relationship between a planet and its moons.
Science notice
