Astroblog

Friday, February 19, 2021

Seeing Mars tonight after Perseverance's Landing(19 February 2021)

Evening sky at 21:37 ACDST (90 minutes after sunset), on Thursday, February 19 facing north-west as seen from Adelaide. Mars is the brightest object low above the north-western horizon, aside from the nearby Moon, with Uranus nearby. Mars is drawing closer to the Pleiades cluster.

Similar views will be seen elsewhere in Australia at the equivalent local time (90 minutes after sunset), click to embiggen.

The approximate view from Perseverance's landing site looking south east tonight (well actually, it's around 1 am, earth rises not long before local sunrise).

Mars tonight is a little different. If you have clear skies (unlike me) look to the north-west. You eye is immediately drawn to the almost first quarter Moon. below and too the west (left) is the bright orange dot that is Mars.

Tonight, Mars is occupied by one more robot, the rover Perseverance (Percy) joins Curiosity roving over the surface of Mars after a nail biting descent using a sky-crane. Amongst the bevy of science instruments is the experimental helicopter Intrepid. It is rather mind-boggling to think we may soon have a helicopter gallivanting around Mars.

Percy landed almost precisely on target in Jezero Crater, wher it will drill samples of an ancient river delta for signs of life. The samples will be returned to earth by a later mission is all goes well.

The river delta landing site of Percy is almost 4,000 kilometers from Curiosities landing site in the ancient lake-bed of Gale crater.

The first images from Percy by the hazard cameras were received shortly after landing (you can see the public raw images here) and we can expect a trove of new images as the other instruments come on line.

If Percy was o take an image of the night-sky towards dawn, it would look something like the image above.

Percy and Curiosity will shortly joined by the Chinese lander from it's Tiawen-1 orbiter, which successfully achieved orbit earlier, along with the UAE's orbiter Hope. This is a bumper yera for Mar's planetary science, and we will never look at Mars in the same way from now on.

Labels: Earth from Mars, Mars, spacecraft

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 10:35 pm 0 comments

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Earth as seen from Mars on 19 October 2014, with Added Comet Siding Spring


Comet C/2012 A1 Siding Spring as seen from Mars on the 19th of October 2014, with the Moon Demios and Earth. Simulated in Stellarium. Click to embiggen	Comet C/2012 A1 Siding Spring as seen from Mars on the 20th of October 2014, if it hasn't impacted Mars it will be as bright as Venus. With the Moon Demios and the Southern Cross.

Strangely, one of the top searches that brings people to my blog is "Earth from Mars", so I started to provide views of Earth from Mars simulated in Stellarium (see here and here for some previous examples I have provided) .

But seeing as the story of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) potentially impacting Mars has gone viral around the world (astroblog is currently number 2 when you Google "C/2013 A1" see my previous posts here and here, with Celestia script, my post also got mentioned in New Scientist too, WOOT, along with Universe Today) I thought I would give the Earth from Mars fans something special. Earth from Mars with comet C/2013 A1 in view.

On the 19th (Mars at Adelaide equivalent time, around 18th UT) Earth is low above the eastern Martian horizon pre-Dawn, and the comet is bright and near the Zenith. By the 20th (19th UT) comet Siding SPring has zipped over to the Southern skies, and is glowing at roughly magnitude -4, as bright as Venus is in Earths skies. This should be easy to image from the Mars orbiters and surface rovers.

There is no tail on the comet because predicting tail appearance is difficult, at Mars's distance the comet may have a rather short tail.

Labels: comet, Earth, Earth from Mars, Mars, stellarium