A transit of Phobos across the Sun as seen from Mars takes place when Phobos passes directly between the Sun and a point on the surface of Mars, obscuring a large part of the Sun's disc for an observer on Mars. During a transit, Phobos can be seen from Mars as a large black disc rapidly moving across the face of the Sun. At the same time, the shadow (antumbra) of Phobos moves across the Martian surface. The event could also be regarded as a particularly quick and shallow annular solar eclipse by Phobos.
Transit
A transit of Phobos from Mars usually lasts only thirty seconds or so due to the moon's very rapid orbital period of approximately 7.6 hours. Because Phobos orbits close to Mars and in line with its equator, transits of Phobos occur somewhere on Mars on most days of the Martian year. Its orbital inclination is 1.08°, so the latitude of its shadow projected onto the Martian surface shows a seasonal variation, moving from 70.4°S to 70.4°N and back again over the course of a Martian year. Phobos is so close to Mars that it is not visible south of 70.4°S or north of 70.4°N; for some days in the year, its shadow misses the surface entirely and falls north or south of Mars. At any given geographical location on the surface of Mars, there are two intervals in a Martian year when the shadow of Phobos or Deimos is passing through its latitude. During each such interval, about half a dozen transits of Phobos can be seen by observers at that geographical location (compared to zero or one transits of Deimos). Transits of Phobos happen during Martian autumn and winter in the respective hemisphere; close to the equator they happen around the March and September equinoxes, while farther from the equator they happen closer to the winter solstice. Observers at high latitudes (but less than 70.4°) will see a noticeably smaller angular diameter for Phobos because they are considerably farther away from it than observers at Mars's equator. As a result, transits of Phobos for such observers will cover less of the Sun's disk. Because it orbits so close to Mars, Phobos cannot be seen north of 70.4°N or south of 70.4°S; observers at such latitudes will obviously not see transits, either. Mars Rover Opportunity rover (MER-B) had photographed some transits of Phobos on 7, 10 and 12 March 2004. In the captions as seen below, the first row shows Earth time UTC, and the second row shows Martian local solar time.
The data in the tables below is generated using JPL Horizons. There is some small discrepancy with the times reported for the series of images above. This may be due to imprecision in the ephemeris data used by JPL Horizons; also the JPL Horizons data gives local apparent solar time while the times reported above are probably some form of mean solar time (and therefore some of the discrepancy would be due to the Martian equivalent of the equation of time).
March 5, 2024: NASA released images of transits of the moon Deimos, the moon Phobos and the planet Mercury as viewed by the Perseverance rover on the planet Mars.
Images of the shadow Viewed from orbit, the penumbral shadow of Phobos can be seen to move rapidly over the Martian surface. This shadow on the Martian surface has been photographed on many occasions by Mars Global Surveyor.
Viking 1
In the 1970s, the Viking 1 Lander and Orbiter photographed the shadow as well. The Lander detected the penumbral shadow of Phobos passing across it. This was detected only as a slight dimming of the ambient light; the Viking 1 Lander camera did not image the Sun. The shadow took about 20 seconds to pass over the Lander, moving at about 2 km/s. The shadow was simultaneously imaged from the Viking 1 Orbiter, which permitted locating the position of the lander in the orbiter pictures.
26 August 1999 image
Far more detailed images of the shadow were taken with the arrival in 1997 of the Mars Global Surveyor and its high-resolution Mars Orbital Camera. One such image was taken on 26 August 1999 and shows the shadow at high resolution. This image was featured in a 1 November 1999 NASA press release. By examining maps of Mars we see the shadow is centered at around 10.9°N 49.2°W. We can also look up the original image files at M04-03241 (red) and M04-03242 (blue), part of the gallery of MOC Wide-Angle Images, Region Lunae Palus, Subphase M04. The "image start time" was 03:26:13.01 UTC, the "line integration time" is 80.4800 milliseconds, and the "downtrack summing" factor is 4. Since the shadow is centered at 6400 pixels from the bottom of the original 10800-pixel-high image (Mars Global Surveyor had a south-to-north Sun-synchronous orbit), we add (6400 × 0.08048 × 4) = 2060.3 seconds = 34 minutes 20.3 seconds to get a time of 04:00:33.3 UTC for the center of the shadow. Putting in the longitude/latitude/altitude coordinate values -310.8,10.9,0 into JPL Horizons we see that the predicted time of mid-transit was 04:00:36 UTC, in perfect agreement within the error of determining the exact longitude and latitude of the center of the shadow. This was about 14:41 Martian local solar time, and the Sun's altitude was 46.5° above the horizon. JPL Horizons also shows that on 26 August 1999 the distance between the Earth and Mars was 9.6 light-minutes.
Other images
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