NASA's Curiosity Rover recently captured an intriguing video of Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, rising in the night sky.
"You asked for the moon. Here it is! See footage from my Navcom of Mars' moon Phobos rising," Curiosity's Twitter account posted on its feed July 1 with a link to the footage.
Made from 86 images taken over the course of 27 minutes, the 32-second video depicts a small, rising bead of light partially lost at first in the diffuse ring visible in the video, which is caused by the scattering of light inside the camera, Space.com reports officials as saying.
Roughly 14 miles wide, the tiny moon is heavily cratered and orbits Mars three times every day so closely that at some points it is not visible in certain locations on Mars.
Meanwhile, the moon is drawing closer to the Red Planet at a rate of roughly 6 feet every 100 years. Based on this evidence, NASA officials explain, it will either crash into Mars in 50 million years or break up into a ring.
The moon's most prominent feature is the 6-mile crater known as Stickney, which appears to be filled with fine dust, as seen by the Mars Global Surveyor.
Measurements of the day and night sides of Phobos reveal temperature variations so extreme that the sunlit side of the moon rivals a pleasant winter day in Chicago, according to NASA, while only a few miles away where the Sun does not reach, the climate is more harsh than a night in Antarctica.
With no atmosphere, scientists speculate that Phobos may be a captured asteroid, though this theory is highly debated.
Deimos is the smaller of Mars' two moons with a mean radius of approximately 4 miles. Like Phobos, Deimos is lumpy and heavily cratered, though its craters are generally smaller than 1.5 miles in diameter and lack the grooves and ridges seen on Phobos.
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