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Small BodiesStories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
Mars Orbiter Mission Methane Sensor for Mars is at work
After several months of near-silence, ISRO's Mars Orbiter Mission has released on Facebook the first data product from its Methane Sensor For Mars. Don't get too excited about methane yet: there is no positive or negative detection. The news here is that the Methane Sensor for Mars is working, systematically gathering data. They also released several new photos of Mars.
Mars Orbiter Mission images Mars' moons, including the far side of Deimos
Today I'm excited to show you some previously unreleased images from Mars Orbiter Mission, containing Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos.
Phobos over Mars
Today the Mars Orbiter Mission released a nice four-image animation of teeny dark Phobos crossing Mars' huge orange disk. Mars Orbiter Mission joins a long line of Mars missions that have produced images of Mars and Phobos together.
Cool animations of Phobos transits from Curiosity
Shooting video of a lumpy moon crossing the Sun and turning it into a giant googly eye is not a new activity for Curiosity, but I get a fresh thrill each time I see one of these sequences downlinked from the rover.
DPS 2013: The fascination of tiny worlds
In which I summarize Joe Veverka's Kuiper Prize talk at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting:
Super cool Phobos and Deimos animations from Mars Express
I've been delving in to the Mars Express image archive this week, checking out its images of Phobos, and found a couple of really cool time-series of images to assemble into animations.
More fancy Phobos and Deimos photography by Curiosity
Curiosity looked up after dark and captured more cool photos of Mars' moons. They include Phobos and Deimos passing in the night, and Phobos entering Mars' shadow.
A special Phobos eclipse
Those sneaky scientists on Curiosity managed to catch a Phobos transit of the Sun with one set of cameras, and to watch its shadow darkening the surface with another. COOL!
Movie of Phobos and Deimos from Curiosity: super cool and scientifically useful
Yesterday, the Curiosity mission released the video whose potential I got so excited about a couple of weeks ago: the view, from Curiosity, of Phobos transiting Deimos in the Martian sky. In this post, Mark Lemmon answers a bunch of my questions about why they photograph Phobos and Deimos from rovers.
A Turn of the Kaleidoscope
New images from Mars.
Curiosity is copying Cassini's tricks!
Take a look at this amazing photo, captured by Curiosity from the surface of Mars on sol 351 (August 1, 2013). It is unmistakably Phobos.
Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Finds Thrill of Newberries on Matijevic Hill
On reconnaissance of Matijevic Hill, Opportunity has driven right into another Martian mystery, compete with new kinds of “berries,
An alien moon, photographed from the surface of an alien world
Curiosity has successfully photographed a crescent Phobos in a bright daylit Martian sky.
At last: Rosetta's Mars flyby photos have been released!
On February 24, 2007, the Rosetta spacecraft passed by Mars, the second of four planetary gravity-assist flybys on its long route to a 2014 rendezvous with comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the time, they released two photos from the main science camera, OSIRIS.
Mars Exploration Family Portrait
Jason Davis put together this neat summary of the checkered history of Mars exploration.
Notes from Day 5 of the EPSC/DPS meeting: Saturn's storm, Phobos, and Lutetia
Today was (is) the last day of the Division of Planetary Sciences / European Planetary Science Congress meeting in Nantes, France.
Update: Phobos and Jupiter and its moons!
Remember that neat picture and movie of Phobos passing by Jupiter that I posted last week? Several people asked me where Jupiter's moons were, and I just assumed that they weren't visible. I was wrong; Mars Express spotted Jupiter's moons along with the planet and Mars' moon!
Watching Phobos pass by Jupiter
Here is a really cool view of Phobos in the foreground with gigantic (but very distant) Jupiter sitting in the background, a fortuitous alignment that the Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera team took advantage of on June 1.
Animation of Phobos rotating from recent Mars Express flyby images
Daniel Macháček has colorized some terrific images of Phobos and run them through some morphing software to make a seamless animation that appears to show Phobos rotating before you.