Researchers created the videos using pictures taken by NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, which has been chugging around the Red Planet's surface since January 2004. One movie shows the sun setting over the Martian horizon, while the other shows the Mars moon Phobos traversing the face of the sun.
"These visualizations of an alien sunset show what it must have looked like for Opportunity, in a way we rarely get to see, with motion," rover science team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University said in a statement.
The Astronomical Research Center (A.R.C) mentioned that the sunset movie combines exposures taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera (Pancam) on Nov. 4 and Nov. 5, 2010, and also inserts some simulated frames to smooth the action, researchers said. It accelerates about 17 minutes of sunset into a 30-second clip. [New Martian sunset movie]
In the video, dust particles make the Martian sky appear reddish and create a bluish glow around the sun.
The rover team has taken Pancam images of sunsets on several previous occasions, gaining scientifically valuable information about the variability of dust in Mars' lower atmosphere. The new clip is the longest sunset movie from Mars ever produced, taking advantage of high levels of solar energy currently available to Opportunity, researchers said.