NASA Curiosity Mars Captures Mercury Passing in Front of Sun

The journey of Mercury in front of the Sun has been captured from another planet by NASA's Curiosity Mars.

The space agency's six-wheeled Curiosity Mars rover has imaged the planet Mercury moving across the sun, making this the first time Mercury was captured transiting the sun from another planet other than the Earth and the first observation of Mercury made from the Red planet. The picture captured was later sent back to Earth.

The planet appears as a faint spot that travels across the face of the Sun. Mercury was captured by telephoto camera of Curiosity's two-eyed Mast Camera instrument.

Mercury fills just one-sixth of one pixel on the image due to which it does not have a distinct shape, but its position follows Mercury's expected path based on orbital calculation.

"This is a nod to the relevance of planetary transits to the history of astronomy on Earth," said Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University and a member of the Mastcam science team. "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."

This new astronomical feature was captured on June 3, 2014, from Curiosity's position inside Gale Crater on Mars. Apart from capturing the journey of Mercury, the Mastcam even images a pair of sunspots that are nearly the size of our blue planet.  The sunspots shift only at the pace of the sun's rotation that is extremely slower than the movement of Mercury.

Prior to this, in June 2012 viewers saw Venus transit.  The next Mercury transit will be seen only on May 9, 2016. Mercury and Venus transits are seen more from Mars than Earth. The next Mercury transit from Mars will be seen in April 2015 and Venus will be seen in August 2030 and will be visible from Earth in November 2084.