I've heard that a solar eclipse will be occured at Spirit/Opportunity's landing site next week from www.sina.com.cn, the largest website in China. Because the know-nothing reporters always publish science-related news mistakenly (The foolish reporters published an earth's photo today, in the photo, the earth is very big and clear. they say the photo was taken by Spirit from Mars, actually it was taken by Apollo 8), so I'm not sure if the news true or false. I searched the web at google, and found nothing about the possible solar eclipses. Could anyone tell me if any solar eclipses will be occured next week?

Here is information about that experiment. I hope it's successful.

A registration/subscription may be required, so here's the gist of the article:

Scientists Turn Rover's Gaze to Martian Dusk, Moons' Eclipses

...The Mars rover Opportunity shifted its gaze from the microscopic to the celestial — moving from an examination of grains of soil to a dramatic Martian sunset.

Scientists on Thursday unveiled time-lapse images of the setting sun in a murky Martian dusk. These first sunset images of the mission were captured about two weeks ago by the rover's panoramic camera.

Next week, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena will attempt a Martian first — recording an eclipse of the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos...

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Next week, when? Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday or Saturday?

Phobos and Deimos..., Phobos or Deimos? or the both??

What a news report!

Phobos is only 6,000 kilometres from Martian surface, and runs around Mars once a few hours, so perhaps it has much possibility to transit over the Sun. But for Deimos, I'm not sure how seldom the transit can be occured, maybe less than the Moon transit over the Sun on the Earth.

Sorry, I'm not the LA Times, NASA, or JPL.

If I find more specific information I will post it.

请劳驾

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I've just posted a mock-up of a Phobos transit as seen from Mars
here

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Which is from Wednesday, March 3. The press conference gave the impression that we're into an eclipse "season," so that there will be a bunch of them rather than just one.

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So we're just talking about a transit here, not an actual eclipse. Mars's moons aren't big enough to cause anything dramatic like a solar eclipse.

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A picture's worth a thousand words. Great idea. 8)

Deimos should be about 97% smaller in area compared to Phobos due to it's much greater distance and smaller size. It will be probably look like the "fastest sunspot in the west" (or will it be east?).

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"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Any idea what kind of observations they will make during these eclipses? Images of Phobos crossing the Sun are certain I would assume, but what using the pancam or navigation cameras to catch the shadow as it moves across the landscape, or changes in sky colour/brightness during the event?

There will be no shadow, as the Sun will not be totally obscured; I am not sure that the rovers have a camera rigged to observe the transit of Phobos, but very little of scientific value would come from such an observation IMO.

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But it's way cool!

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The rovers seem to take quite a few images of the sun to find its orientation on the planet to enable it to accurately point it high gain antenna toward Earth I think. The camera has a special filter to do this.

There are also quite a few images from MGS showing the dark shadow of Phobos sweeping across the surface of the planet.

We might be in luck then; although the transit seems only to last a few seconds, as Phobos moves very fast.

The shadow on the surface of Mars must be a penumbra, rather than a full shadow;
from the BBC;

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Wait, there are two separate things being discussed here: is this event a transit of the moons across the sun or an eclipse of the moons?

I was wondering the same thing. Maksutov's reference:

To me, an "eclipse of the . . . moon" would be the equivalent of our lunar eclipse, that is, the planet's shadow being cast on the moon. But I thought Spirit and Opportunity went to "sleep" during the Martian night . . .

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Look at eburacum45's post - it's a transit/solar eclipse, not a lunar eclipse. The latter are probably extremely common on Mars.

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I found such a transit at Meridiani Planum this week. Phobos transit from the Sun on 2004-Mar-06 19:22:03 UTC. I computed the above with Horizons On-Line Ephemeris System introduced by JPL.

The transit will start at 2004-Mar-06 19:21:52 UT in SCET.
The transit will end at 2004-Mar-06 19:22:14 UT in SCET.

The angular separation between the Sun and the Phobos is 0.1999 degrees on 2004-Mar-06 at 19:22:03.

Starry Night shows me a transit of Deimos from Gusev crater (Spirit's landing site) on 2004-03-06 from 15:39:40 to 14:41:10 UT (approximately).

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What I wrote was a quote from an article in the Los Angeles Times. It was also cross verified by an article I had already read in space.com (see here). Apparently Jim Bell of JPL, the lead scientist for the panoramic cameras, needs to brush up on his terminology. Here's what he said,