Star like appearance of tiny moon Phobos photobombed Mars

Washington D.C, November 13: While taking the photograph of the Mars, the unexpected appearance of a tiny moon Phobos in the camera's field of view as the picture has been captured in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope. The bounty appearance of the moon was captured during its orbital trek around Mars on 12 May 2016. 

The Hubble captured the 13 separate exposures, during the course of 22 minutes due to which the time-lapse video was created showing the Phobos movement around the Red Planet. The Star like image of the moon has appeared just 27×22×18 km.

It also orbits incredibly close to Mars, just 6000 km above the planet, making it closer to its parent planet than any other moon in the Solar System. In the Solar System, the Phobos orbits just 6000 km above the planet Mars which makes it close to the parent planet other than moon while at a distance of about 23, 500 km, the look-alike Deimos orbits too much far.

By about 2 meters every hundred years, Phobos gets closer to Mars and it is also predicted that in coming 30 to 50 million years it will either collide with the planet or break up into a planetary ring. Between the two natural satellites of Mars, Phobos is the innermost and larger the other one is Deimos. In 1877, both moons were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall.