NASA’s Persevering Mars rover captures young Mars moon Deimos in film

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NASA’s Mars probe captured a time-lapse movie of the somewhat cloudy Martian sky when it chanced upon the red planet’s youngest moon, Deimos, shimmering in the Martian aurora.

The Perseverance team produced a short film of the Martian sky taken from a series of images from the Mars rover and posted the video on Twitter under the rover’s Twitter account, NASAPersevere.

Watching the sky is fun no matter where you are. I caught this movie with a short time-lapse to see the clouds, and picked up something else: Look closely and you’ll see Deimos, one of Mars’ moons. twitter.com/akfbhfsw33 Aug 20 2021

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The Mars rover, which landed on Mars earlier this year, has already begun the work it has been sent to Mars to perform. I’ve finally been able to collect soil samples and search for signs of ancient life in an area of ​​Mars that was once thought to contain a primitive lake that dried up billions of years ago.

Like its cousin NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, the Perseverance is particularly adept at social media — or, more precisely, their teams back at JPL — and so getting new posts from the perspective of the newest Mars rover via Twitter sounds like science. A tradition that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Analysis: Science is so much more than “Eureka!”

While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Deimos or its sister moon, Phobos, from the surface of Mars, the latest time-lapse movie is a reminder that the best science usually happens when you least expect it or look for it for something else entirely.

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries, such as penicillin, came about because someone saw or realized something that did not set out to find it, but followed their curiosity towards an important discovery or to show us something known from a new perspective.

So while discovering Deimos from the crater of Jezero Crater and capturing it in a movie isn’t entirely new, it still inspires the kind of awe that makes us all love science, and space science in particular, in the first place.

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