DETROIT – I’ve shown you videos of solar eclipses many times over my long career. But the one I’m going to show you here is a first for me, and probably for you. It’s a solar eclipse on Mars.
Before getting to the details, allow me first to explain that a total solar eclipse here on Earth is the result of some pretty amazing geometry: our moon is the perfect size and distance from the Earth such that it appears in the sky to be the same size as the sun. So, when the moon passes exactly between the sun and the Earth, it covers the sun for a few minutes and gets dark outside.
Things are quite different on Mars. Its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are much smaller than our moon.
In fact, Phobos is only fourteen miles in diameter. So, when NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars recently shot a video of Phobos passing directly across the solar disk, it looked more like a potato crossing the sun, and that’s what a “total” solar eclipse looks like on Mars.
Check out the video; this is so cool, and share it with your friends; they’ll be amazed.