Watch Martian Moon Deimos as it eclipses Jupiter as seen by the Mars Express satellite

The Mars Express spacecraft serves up unique view of alignment between Martian and Jovian moons

The latest update from the European Space Agency’s long serving Mars Express spacecraft shows the Martian moon Deimos passing in front of Jupiter and its Moons, creating an eclipse of the distant gas giant as seen from more than 460 million miles away.

In a video shared to social media website Twitter by the ESA Science account, Deimos, the smallest of the two Moons of Mars, can be seen passing in front of the bright, white disk of Jupiter and four smaller, fainter spots of light. Those spots are Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede on the left, and then Io and Callisto on the right.

The video is actually a series of 80 still images taken by the Mars Express orbiter’s High Resolution Stereo Camera in February, according to an ESA blog. Special contrast processing of each moon was necessary to make them visible in the resulting video, as the immense and bright Jupiter would have washed them out in a raw view of the transit of Deimos across the Jovian system.

Deimos is an irregular, lumpy and small moon, only 7 to 9 miles in diameter, appearing more like the asteroids of the belt between Mars and Jupiter than any of the Jovian moons or the Moon of Earth.

Launched atop a Russian Soyuz rocket in 2003 and carrying both an orbiter and the Beagle 2 lander, Mars Express was ESA’s first planetary mission.

While the space agency lost contact with the lander shortly after it landed on Mars, the Mars Express orbiter has been in continual operation since 2004, studying the Martian climate and mapping signs of subsurface water from orbit. In operation for nearly 19 years as of late 2022, Mars Express is the second longest active spacecraft orbiting a planet besides Earth behind Nasa’s 2001 Mars Odyssey mission, which has been at Mars for nearly 21 years.