* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Phobos and Deimos

Blobrana · L

For the very first time, the martian moons Phobos and Deimos have been caught on camera together. ESA's Mars Express orbiter took these pioneering images last month. Apart from their 'wow' factor, these unique images will help the HRSC team validate and refine existing orbit models of the two moons.

Raw and processed images

The images were acquired with the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) of the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The camera took 130 images of the moons on 5 November at 9:14 CET over period of 1.5 minutes at intervals of 1s, speeding up to 0.5-s intervals toward the end. The image resolution is 110 m/pixel for Phobos and 240 m/pixel for Deimos - Deimos was more than twice as far from the camera.

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Blobrana · L

Efforts to reach the martian moon Phobos have long been outshined by missions to the Red Planet itself. Now, scientists in Russia, Canada and the U.S. are preparing their own missions to the largest moon of Mars.
Mars actually has two moons: Phobos and Deimos. They might more properly be called satellites, however, because they are extremely small, only a few kilometres in diameter. In fact, some scientists think Phobos and Deimos could be asteroids that somehow ended up orbiting Mars instead of crashing into the planet, or they could be leftovers from the time of planetary formation. Another option is that the moons are fragments of Mars, blasted off the planets surface by a large asteroid or comet impact.

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Blobrana · L

Deimos, Moon of Mars Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

HiRISE captured these enhanced-colour images of Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars, on 21 February 2009.
Deimos has a smooth surface due to a blanket of fragmental rock or regolith, except for the most recent impact craters. It is a dark, reddish object, very similar to Phobos, shown here in enhanced HiRISE colours (near-infrared, red, and blue-green).

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Blobrana · L

Photo mosaic of Phobos in super resolution

HI-RES JPEG (Size: 823 kb) HI-RES TIFF (Size: 16 609 kb)

Credits: ESA/ DLR (S. Semm, M. Wählisch, K.Willner)/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

This mosaic image is composed by 53 pictures obtained by the Super Resolution Channel (or SRC, a part of the High Resolution Stereo Camera experiment) on board ESA's Mars Express. The SRC images covered 70% of the moon's surface. The remaining area is filled with 16 images previously obtained by NASA's Viking mission. The mean resolution is 12 m/pixel.

Source ESA

Blobrana · L

European space scientists are getting closer to unravelling the origin of Mars larger moon, Phobos. Thanks to a series of close encounters by ESAs Mars Express spacecraft, the moon looks almost certain to be a rubble pile, rather than a single solid object. However, mysteries remain about where the rubble came from.
Unlike Earth, with its single large moon, Mars plays host to two small moons. The larger one is Phobos, an irregularly sized lump of space rock measuring just 27 km x 22 km x 19 km.

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Blobrana · L

Mars Express acquires sharpest images of martian moon Phobos
Mars Express closed in on the intriguing martian moon Phobos at 6:49 CEST on 23 July, flying past at 3 km/s, only 93 km from the moon. The ESA spacecrafts fly-bys of the moon have returned its most detailed full-disc images ever, also in 3-D, using the High Resolution Stereo Camera on board.

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Blobrana · L

Mars Express to rendezvous with Martian moon
Scientists and engineers are preparing ESAs Mars Express for a pair of close fly-bys of the Martian moon Phobos. Passing within 100 km of the surface, Mars Express will conduct some of the most detailed investigations of the moon to date.
The series of fly-bys will take place between 12 July and 3 August. During the second encounter, the spacecraft will fly within 273 km of the surface. Six days later, Mars Express will close to within just 97 km.

The upcoming fly-bys:

Date Altitude at closest approach
12 July 563 km
17 July 273 km
23 July 97 km
28 July 361 km
3 August 664 km

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Blobrana · L

Title: Theoretical Formulation of the Phobos, moon of Mars, rate of altitudinal loss
Authors: Bijay Kumar Sharma

Phobos is a moon of mars below the synchronous orbit. Because of tidal interaction it is losing its altitude and is launched on a shrinking spiral path of total destruction. Based on planetary-satellite dynamics its rate of loss of altitude is calculated to be twenty meters per century and its doomsday is predicted to be at eleven mega years from now.

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Blobrana · L

Phobos