An Annular Eclipse of the Sun...

Down on the surface of Mars, the Curiosity rover looked up to see a beautiful annular eclipse of the sun by the Martian moon Phobos. You can easily see that Phobos is not spherical – it's shaped more like a potato than a ball...

Curiosity: Occultation...

Curiosity recently took a sequence of images of the Martian moon Phobos occulting its sister moon Deimos.  Phobos is physically larger than Deimos, and is in a lower orbit, so its apparent size from the surface of Mars is much larger.  The good folks at JPL took this sequence of images and made a movie out of them:

Phobos...

The Mars Express orbiter recently took this photo of Mars' mysterious dark moon Phobos. 

I remember vividly the science fiction stories of my youth, wherein the authors could plausibly posit that the two satellites of Mars were not of natural origin, but were (depending on the story) either remnants of Martian civilizations, remnants of prior Earth civilizations, or artifacts of alien civilizations.  They could do this because we knew so little about these tiny little moons.  Now all those lovely story lines are destroyed because of sharp photos like this – but now we've got an even more intriguing series of questions and mysteries!

Via APOD.

Autochromes...

A fascinating online collection of very early (~1910) color photos, using a technique called “autochrome”...

Phobos is Hollow?

Apparently there's some data from at least two of the spacecraft orbiting Mars that indicates that about 1/3 of the volume of Phobos is empty.  I haven't been able to locate the original reports of this.  For all I know, this simply means that Phobos is really just a loose collection of boulders with lots of empty space between them – or possibly even the conclusions about the data are misrepresented. 

But whatever the data and conclusions are, the tin-foil hat brigade is already at it...

Mars Express Phobos Fly-By Photos...

Photos from the March 7 fly-by have just been released.  The first image is at right (click to enlarge).