NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has captured a remarkable celestial sight: Earth briefly vanishing behind Phobos in the evening sky of Mars.
A newly released sequence of images shows Earth as a tiny point of light while Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, moves across the sky and passes directly in front of it. The observation marks the first time humanity has recorded Earth disappearing behind another object from the surface of a different planet.
Earth Vanishes in the Martian Evening Sky
Perseverance recorded the sequence with its Mastcam-Z instrument at about 7 p.m. local solar time (the Martian evening time where the rover is located) on July 2, the 1,907th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
In the composite view, Earth moves diagonally from the upper left toward the lower right. Phobos travels in the opposite direction, crossing from the lower left toward the upper right. By the third image in the sequence, the two objects line up, and Earth briefly disappears behind the shadowed edge of the small moon.
