NASA has released a spectacular image of the solar eclipse on Mars, captured by the Perseverance rover's camera.
The Mastcam-Z mast cam on the Perseverance rover immortalised by the extraordinary moment when one of Mars' moons, Phobos, passed in front of the Sun. The image, taken by the rover on 2 April, shows the potato-shaped moon passing in front of the Sun for about 40 seconds.
Phobos is one of the irregularly shaped moons of Mars, much smaller than the Earth's Moon at only 22 x 12 kilometres. It is much closer to Mars than the Moon is to Earth, just over 5,700 kilometres away (the Earth-Moon distance is 384,400 km), and researchers estimate that it is getting closer to the planet at a rate of 1.8 metres per century.
Perseverance has recently reached a major milestone: it has successfully Retrieved from the ancient river delta of the red planet, which scientists hope may have preserved traces of Martian life. Researchers have been remotely monitoring the estuary for more than a year, and one of the rover's main tasks will be to take more images of the delta.
After a risky landing in July last year, the Mars rover landed in February this year in a former lake bed, the Jezero crater, which was designated as the landing site, with the aim of discovering the geology and climate history of the body, as well as evidence that life once existed on the red planet.
