Perseverance Captures Another Phobos Transit

NASA Science reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover photographed the silhouette of Phobos crossing the Sun on August twelve, twenty twenty‑six, marking the one thousand nine hundred forty‑eighth sol of the mission. The rover’s Mastcam‑Z camera captured the event, and the team released an animation tinted to approximate what an astronaut would see through solar eclipse glasses on the Martian surface. By stacking this transit with earlier ones recorded since the rover landed in February two thousand twenty‑one, researchers can fine‑tune the moon’s potato‑shaped orbit. Over very long time scales, that orbit is expected to decay, eventually sending Phobos crashing into Mars.

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