Curiosity rover captures video of Martian solar eclipse

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has been giving scientists back here on Earth an incredible amount of new information about the ground under its wheels, but every once in awhile it turns its gaze upwards to catch a remarkable event, like a solar eclipse.

Solar eclipses on Mars are a little different than they are here on Earth. Here, we can make an event of it, as the moon can take over two hours to complete its track across the disk of the Sun. On Mars, because Phobos makes one orbit of the planet in just 7 hours and 39 minutes, it transits across the sun so quickly that if you look away for 30 seconds or so, you can completely miss out.

Curiosity was ready on August 20th, though, and it trained its cameras onto the Sun to watch Mars' larger moon, Phobos, form a 'ring of fire' or 'annular' solar eclipse:

The entire transit took about 32 seconds. At the same time, Curiosity's other cameras were still trained on the ground, and they picked up the effect of Phobos' shadow passing over rover's location:

Considering that Phobos' shadow is pretty small compared to the shadow of our Moon, Curiosity was in the perfect location to capture this event.

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Curiosity has been on the surface of Mars for over a year now, after performing a destruction-defying stunt landing back in the early hours of August 6th, 2012. It hasn't even reached its primary mission destination yet (the base of Mount Sharp), but it has already completed its primary mission objective, to show that Mars once had an environment that was favourable for life.

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