Mars Curiosity Rover Spots Mercury Crossing the Sun

Source: NBC


A camera on NASA's Curiosity rover captured this filtered, processed view of the sun as seen from the Martian surface. The fuzzy spot within the crosshairs is the planet Mercury, which fills only about one-sixth of a pixel. The two other dark spots on the sun's disk are sunspots.

How complicated can solar system sightseeing get? Check this out: NASA's Curiosity rover looks up from Mars, takes a picture of the planet Mercury moving across the sun, and then sends it back to Earth.

Mercury is just a fuzzy spot on the series of solar views, captured on June 3 by the telephoto camera that's part of Curiosity's Mastcam instrument. Nevertheless, it marks a couple of firsts: the first planetary transit of the sun observed from any planet other than Earth, and the first image of Mercury captured from Mars.

"This is a nod to the relevance of planetary transits to the history of astronomy on Earth," Texas A&M's Mark Lemmon, a member of the Mastcam science team, said in a NASA news release. "Observations of Venus transits were used to measure the size of the solar system, and Mercury transits were used to measure the size of the sun."

Two sunspots can also be seen in Curiosity's snapshots.

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Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/mars-curiosity-rover-spots-mercury-crossing-sun-n127871