Worlds Apart: Planet and Moon Align

By jmajor - June 19, 2011 at 5:41 PM UTC | Planetary Science

Here's a cool animation showing Mars' little moon

Phobos

passing in front of distant Jupiter from the viewpoint of ESA's Mars Express orbiter:

The conjunction event occurred on June 1.

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Only 21 km (13 miles) across at the widest, the irregularly-shaped Phobos may have been created by a large impact on Mars in its distant past, a chunk of the planet's crust thrown into orbit. Mars Express most recently performed a close

flyby

of Phobos back on January 9, passing it at a distance of only 100 km (62 miles).

What's really amazing to think about is the distances between these two worlds – about 529 million km! But those kinds of distances are no hindrance to vision out in space, especially when the farther object is a giant planet like Jupiter.

The images were taken with Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), which was kept centered on Jupiter during the conjunction. A total of 104 images were taken over a span of 68 seconds to create the animation.

– ESA

Read the news release on the ESA Space Science site

here

.

All images shown here were processed at the Department of Planetary Sciences and Remote Sensing at the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Freie Universität Berlin. Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)