The Phobos Mystery. The Mystery Moon of Mars

Wed Apr 28, 2010 8:25 pm » by **Savwafair2012**

Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mysterious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos. Joseph Shklovskii noted member of the Soviet Academy of science and co-writer with Dr Carl Sagan of 'Intelligent life in the unverse', once calculated from the estimated density of the Martian atmosphere and the peculiar "acceleration" of Phobos, that the satellite must be hollow. Could Phobos be a hollowed-out space station of huge proportions?

In July 1988, the Russians launched two unmanned satellite probes - Phobos 1 and phobos 2 - in the direction of Mars, and with the primary intention of investigating the planet's mysterious moon, Phobos. Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route two months later, reportedly because of a radio command error. Phobos 2 was also ultimately lost in the most intriguing circumstances, but not before it had beamed back certain images and information from the planet Mars itself.

Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into and orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination towards its ultimate goal: to transfer to an orbit that the would make it fly almost in tandem with the Martian moonlet called Phobos (hence the spacecrafts name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlet's surface.

All went well until Phobos aligned itself with Phobos, the Martian moonlet. Then, on 28th March, the Soviet mission control centre acknowledged sudden communication "problems" with the spacecraft; nd Tass the, the official Soviet news agency, reported that "Phobos 2 had failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact."

What had caused the Phobos 2 spacecraft to be lost? The answer came about three months later. Pressed by the international participants in the Phobos mission to privide definitive data, the Soviet authorities released a taped television transmission Phobos 2 sent in its last moments except for the last frames, taken just seconds before the spacecraft fell silent. The television clip was shown by some TV stations in Europe and Canada as part of weekly 'diary' programs, as a curiosity and not as a hot news item.

The television sequence thus released focused on two anomalies. The first was a network of straight lines in the area of the Martian equator; some of the lines were short, some were longer, some were thin, some were wide enough to look like rectangular shapes 'embossed' in the Martian surface. Arranged in rows parallel to each other, the pattern covered an area of some six hundred square kilometers (more than two hundred and thirty quare miles). The anomaly appeared to be far from a natural phenomenon.

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http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/
http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/6/1115