Mars Attacks! Xal Vektra Lunari

Nothing like a catchy headline. Mars didn't attack, at least not physically. It just experienced an occultation by the Moon. Occults must have had a field day, but I have yet to read anything significant about how oh-cults have gained any traction from this. A cult is a group with an intense devotion to (...) an idea or belief system, often with unquestioning loyalty. In science, questions are most important, and if there is any loyalty, it is to the scientific process of hypothesis, observation/experiment, conclusion, revision to hypothesis, etc. Oh, and cults like to claim they possess secret cosmic knowledge only accessible to chosen members. Anyone can be a chosen member of science.

Back to the Mars thing. It is the fourth planet from the Sun, a terrestrial planet with plenty of rocky material. Its name comes from the Roman God of War, and the Greeks like to call it Ares (like the Ares mission from the great movie The Martian). It has two potaote-shaped moons called Phobos and Deimos (Fear and Terror), which are the horses that pull the chariot of the god of war. Mars orbits the Sun, and we can see it as a red dot in the sky along the ecliptic, the planetary racetrack system, along which all planets race or doddle through the sky. Oh, and Mars can go retrograde, which is an apparent backward motion due to the different speeds of planets in their orbit (Thanks, Johannes Kepler!).

The Moon can occult all planets. The inner planets Mercury and Venus can also experience a transit across the Sun since they are orbiting inside us. Those transits are exceedingly rare:

Next Transits of Mercury

• November 12, 2032

• November 7, 2039

• May 7, 2049

Next Transits of Venus:

• December 10–11, 2117

• December 8, 2125

Back to Mars being occulted. I went outside to observe it on January 13th, 2025. It was a clear night, a bit chilly, but that's to be expected in Winter in Southwest Utah. The apps like SkySafari did a good job of providing detailed times. For Salt Lake City, it began at 6:59 PM and ended at 7:52 PM, so for a different location, the times were only off by a few minutes. All images were taken with my Sony Ar7iii and a 600mm telephoto lens on a tripod

Mars on its way (both objects are moving)

The relative orbital velocities for Mars and the Moon were approximately:

• Mars: Mars orbits the Sun with an average velocity of about 24.1 kilometers per second (km/s) or 15 miles per second or 54,000 miles per hour.

  
  

• The Moon: The Moon orbits Earth at an average speed of approximately 1.0 km/s or 0.6 miles per second 2,237 miles per hour.

The dark parts on the Moon are called mare (pl. maria), after the Latin sea, cause they looked like those to our ancestors and present humans! Can you see the rabbit? The man?

Mars peeking out post-occultation. You can see it at the top.

Here is a sequence of combined pictures processed in Photoshop. It is not a perfect line as my camera was not on a equatorial mount. My telescope setup at home could not image as the occultation ah[[ened behind the hill -- Mars/Moon were not above the horizon.

Mars Occultation Sequence.

Mars is in an advantegous position for Mars missions roughly every 26 months. The nexy launch window for a mission to Mars will be Nov/Dec 2026. Close to 50 missions have been attempted to explore Mars and most are suscessful. However, there is a very high failure rate of spacecraft not being gravitationally captured or crashing. Marsspeed!

A little linguistic creation suing ChatGPT. I simply asked to produce a catchy line for Mars is being occulted by the Mon in a Martian dialect:

"Xal vektra Lunari."

• Xal → "I" (personal pronoun, inspired by "self")

• Vektra → "was hidden/covered" (derived from "occult" and "vector" for movement)

• Lunari → "by the Moon" (inspired by "Luna" and a hypothetical Martian case system)