Mercury Is Spotted For The First Time – From Mars!
The planet Mercury (circled) was seen for the first time from Mars by Curiosity on June 3, 2014
NASA’s Curiosity rover may be busy exploring the rugged and rocky interior of Gale Crater but it does get a chance to skygaze on occasion. And while looking at the Sun on June 3, 2014 (mission Sol 649) the rover’s Mastcam spotted another member of our Solar System: tiny Mercury, flitting across the Sun’s face.
Silhouetted against the bright disk of the Sun, Mercury barely appears as a hazy blur in the filtered Mastcam image above. But it was moving relatively quickly during the transit and passed the darker smudges of two Earth-sized sunspots over the course of several hours. It was the first time Mercury has ever been imaged from Mars, and also the first time we’ve observed a planet transiting our Sun from another world besides our own.
Read the rest of my article (and watch a cool animation of the transit) on Universe Today here.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M
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Another exploit of our ” small robot ” on Mars, great !!
Jeff Barani from Vence (French Riviera)
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Question: Amazing timing coincidence or amazing timing calculation of a predicted event?
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The latter. They knew this would happen and arranged to capture it on camera.
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