According to NASA’s website, the American space agency recently got a good look at the moons of Mars in action.

In a new video from the Mars Curiosity rover viewers can see Phobos, the larger of the two Mars moons, pass directly in front of Deimos, its smaller counterpart. The images in the video, which are sped up to provide a wider sampling of views, mark the first time that the Curiosity rover (or any other Mars-based mission, for that matter) has witnessed a direct eclipse of the moons.

But the images offer more than visual stimuli for the experts working at NASA. The Curiosity rover’s footage of Phomos and Deimos is largely meant as orbital research. According to Mark Lemmon, a professor of Texas A&M University and one of the people primarily responsible for making sense of what the Curiosity camera captures, learning more about Mars’ lunar orbit will help NASA to measure Martian tides and allow scientists to form a firmer grasp of what the interior of the planet might look like.

The orbits for Phobos and Deimos are not fixed, however, making Lemmon’s role a dynamic one. Phobos, for instance, is arcing ever closer to the Martian surface, while Deimos seems to be traveling in the opposite direction.

Despite the impressive new video footage, Curiosity was neither designed nor launched with the intention of simply observing Martian lunar orbits. Instead, the rover is meant to probe a site on Mars called Gale Crater, where NASA scientists assume there was once microbial life. Curiosity will examine the surface and try to build a backlog of information on its environmental history.

The additional images Curiosity was able to glean of the lunar eclipse were bonuses that occurred almost entirely by chance. Lemmon and the rest of his NASA coalition realized that the eclipse would be taking place soon, and Curiosity just happened to be in the right place, ready to film the phenomenon and transmit footage back to Earth. The serendipitous nature of it all allowed NASA to make light adjustment’s to Curiosity’s course so that the rover could get into a perfect position without requiring a major overhaul of the mission or a serious budget reconsideration.