A moon of Mars photobombs the red planet in amazing timelapse video
A tiny moon of Mars is clearly tired of its planet hogging all of humanity's attention.
A newly-released timelapse video taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows Mars' moon Phobos peeking out from behind the planet as it orbited the red world in May 2016.
The Hubble was initially just trying to snap a few nice images of Mars, but Phobos had other plans.
"Over the course of 22 minutes, Hubble took 13 separate exposures, allowing astronomers to create a time-lapse video showing the diminutive moon's orbital path," NASA said in a statement.
"The Hubble observations were intended to photograph Mars, and the moon's cameo appearance was a bonus."
Phobos is a football-shaped moon that's only about 16.5 miles wide, meaning that it could fit inside the island of Manhattan, NASA said.
It makes sense that Phobos would be in need of attention given the fact that the moon is actually doomed.
The moon's orbital period is shrinking. At the moment, it takes about 7 hours and 39 minutes for Phobos to orbit Mars, but that amount of time will continue to shrink until the moon either crashes into Mars or breaks apart in orbit in the next 30 to 50 million years.
"Close-up photos from Mars-orbiting spacecraft reveal that Phobos is apparently being torn apart by the gravitational pull of Mars," NASA said. "The moon is marred by long, shallow grooves that are probably caused by tidal interactions with its parent planet."
Phobos isn't alone in orbit around Mars.
The red planet also plays host to Deimos, another small moon, as well as multiple orbiters — like NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the European Space Agency's Mars Express probe — that circle the world daily.
While plenty of probes and landers have visited Mars, none have set down on or around Phobos and Deimos. Although there are some ideas floating around about how missions to Phobos could actually help on the journey to Mars.
Perhaps this was Phobos' way of letting us know that it's about time for a little attention of its own.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
