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APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 5:05 am
by APOD Robot
Image Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express

Explanation: Why is Phobos so dark? Phobos, the largest and innermost of two Martian moons, is the darkest moon in the entire Solar System. Its unusual orbit and color indicate that it may be a captured asteroid composed of a mixture of ice and dark rock. The featured picture of Phobos near the limb of Mars was captured in 2010 by the robot spacecraft Mars Express currently orbiting Mars. Phobos is a heavily cratered and barren moon, with its largest crater located on the far side. From images like this, Phobos has been determined to be covered by perhaps a meter of loose dust. Phobos orbits so close to Mars that from some places it would appear to rise and set twice a day, but from other places it would not be visible at all. Phobos' orbit around Mars is continually decaying -- it will likely break up with pieces crashing to the Martian surface in about 50 million years.

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Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 7:25 am
by G Hui
And you can see a hint of Martian atmosphere.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:12 pm
by sillyworm 2
Have we sampled Phobos? Determined not a priority?

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm
by FEwood
Incorrect. There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:19 pm
by Ann
FEwood wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm Incorrect. There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.
:wink:

Ann

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:20 pm
by sillyworm 2
FEwood wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm Incorrect. There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.
I thought the same prior to finishing your paragraph.Would it be possible to haul it away?

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:22 pm
by sillyworm 2
Mankind in 50 Million years...I can't even begin to imagine.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:39 pm
by Chris Peterson
FEwood wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm Incorrect. There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.
While I doubt that there will be anybody on Mars, or any space travel at all in this solar system in 1000 years (and certainly not in a few million), I doubt it has any mining value. Most asteroids are likely to be pretty worthless as sources of raw material. Large, differentiated ones, possibly. But these rubble pile asteroids that make up the bulk of them have never had much mineral forming activity, so mining them profitably is like mining ocean water. Lots of stuff there, but so unconcentrated that it costs more to isolate than it is worth.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:41 pm
by Chris Peterson
sillyworm 2 wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:20 pm
FEwood wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm Incorrect. There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.
I thought the same prior to finishing your paragraph.Would it be possible to haul it away?
Ignoring the fact that it's probably pretty worthless, it would be a poor choice for mining in any case, unless it was to build some kind of structure in Mars orbit. Material for use on Earth is much easier to obtain from asteroids in orbit around the Sun. Getting this thing to us from Mars would require an absurd amount of energy.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:08 pm
by orin stepanek
phoboslimb_marsexpress_960.jpg

I can't imagine man to still exist in his present form in 50 million years! probably why we haven't met ET yet! Anyway if we habitat Mars; eventually I'm sure we will develop the technology to stabilize its orbit, and find some use for it! :mrgreen:

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 4:14 pm
by neufer
sillyworm 2 wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:12 pm
Have we sampled Phobos? Determined not a priority?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)#Exploration wrote:
Launched missions:

Phobos has been photographed in close-up by several spacecraft whose primary mission has been to photograph Mars. The first was Mariner 7 in 1969, followed by Mariner 9 in 1971, Viking 1 in 1977, Phobos 2 in 1989 Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 and 2003, Mars Express in 2004, 2008, 2010 and 2019, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007 and 2008. On 25 August 2005, the Spirit rover, with an excess of energy due to wind blowing dust off of its solar panels, took several short-exposure photographs of the night sky from the surface of Mars.

The Soviet Union undertook the Phobos program with two probes, both launched successfully in July 1988. Phobos 1 was accidentally shut down by an erroneous command from ground control issued in September 1988 and lost while the craft was still en route. Phobos 2 arrived at the Mars system in January 1989 and, after transmitting a small amount of data and imagery but shortly before beginning its detailed examination of Phobos's surface, the probe abruptly ceased transmission due either to failure of the onboard computer or of the radio transmitter, already operating on the backup power. Other Mars missions collected more data, but no dedicated sample return mission has been performed.

The Russian Space Agency launched a sample return mission to Phobos in November 2011, called Fobos-Grunt. The return capsule also included a life science experiment of The Planetary Society, called Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment, or LIFE. A second contributor to this mission was the China National Space Administration, which supplied a surveying satellite called "Yinghuo-1", which would have been released in the orbit of Mars, and a soil-grinding and sieving system for the scientific payload of the Phobos lander. However, after achieving Earth orbit, the Fobos–Grunt probe failed to initiate subsequent burns that would have sent it to Mars. Attempts to recover the probe were unsuccessful and it crashed back to Earth in January 2012.
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Missions considered:

In 1997 and 1998, the Aladdin mission was selected as a finalist in the NASA Discovery Program. The plan was to visit both Phobos and Deimos, and launch projectiles at the satellites. The probe would collect the ejecta as it performed a slow flyby (~1 km/s). These samples would be returned to Earth for study three years later. The Principal Investigator was Dr. Carle Pieters of Brown University. The total mission cost, including launch vehicle and operations was $247.7 million. Ultimately, the mission chosen to fly was MESSENGER, a probe to Mercury.

In 2007, the European aerospace subsidiary EADS Astrium was reported to have been developing a mission to Phobos as a technology demonstrator. Astrium was involved in developing a European Space Agency plan for a sample return mission to Mars, as part of the ESA's Aurora programme, and sending a mission to Phobos with its low gravity was seen as a good opportunity for testing and proving the technologies required for an eventual sample return mission to Mars. The mission was envisioned to start in 2016, was to last for three years. The company planned to use a "mothership", which would be propelled by an ion engine, releasing a lander to the surface of Phobos. The lander would perform some tests and experiments, gather samples in a capsule, then return to the mothership and head back to Earth where the samples would be jettisoned for recovery on the surface.
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Proposed missions:

In 2007, the Canadian Space Agency funded a study by Optech and the Mars Institute for an unmanned mission to Phobos known as Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration (PRIME). A proposed landing site for the PRIME spacecraft is at the "Phobos monolith", a prominent object near Stickney crater. The PRIME mission would be composed of an orbiter and lander, and each would carry 4 instruments designed to study various aspects of Phobos's geology. In 2008, NASA Glenn Research Center began studying a Phobos and Deimos sample return mission that would use solar electric propulsion. The study gave rise to the "Hall" mission concept, a New Frontiers-class mission under further study as of 2010.

Another concept of a sample return mission from Phobos and Deimos is OSIRIS-REx II, which would use heritage technology from the first OSIRIS-REx mission.

As of January 2013, a new Phobos Surveyor mission is currently under development by a collaboration of Stanford University, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The mission is currently in the testing phases, and the team at Stanford plans to launch the mission between 2023 and 2033.

In March 2014, a Discovery class mission was proposed to place an orbiter in Mars orbit by 2021 to study Phobos and Deimos through a series of close flybys. The mission is called Phobos And Deimos & Mars Environment (PADME). Two other Phobos missions that were proposed for the Discovery 13 selection included a mission called Merlin, which would flyby Deimos but actually orbit and land on Phobos, and another one is Pandora which would orbit both Deimos and Phobos.

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) unveiled on 9 June 2015 the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX), a sample return mission targeting Phobos. MMX will land and collect samples from Phobos multiple times, along with conducting Deimos flyby observations and monitoring Mars's climate. By using a corer sampling mechanism, the spacecraft aims to retrieve a minimum 10 g amount of samples. NASA, ESA, DLR, and CNES are also participating in the project, and will provide scientific instruments. The U.S. will contribute the Neutron and Gamma-Ray Spectrometer (NGRS), and France the Near IR Spectrometer (NIRS4/MacrOmega). Although the mission has been selected for implementation and is now beyond proposal stage, formal project approval by JAXA has been postponed following the Hitomi mishap. Development and testing of key components, including the sampler, is currently ongoing. As of 2017, MMX is scheduled to be launched in 2024, and will return to Earth five years later.

Russia plans to repeat Fobos-Grunt mission in the late 2020s, and the European Space Agency is assessing a sample-return mission for 2024 called Phootprint.
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As part of a human mission to Mars:

Phobos has been proposed as an early target for a human mission to Mars. The teleoperation of robotic scouts on Mars by humans on Phobos could be conducted without significant time delay, and planetary protection concerns in early Mars exploration might be addressed by such an approach.

Phobos has also been proposed as an early target for a manned mission to Mars because a landing on Phobos would be considerably less difficult and expensive than a landing on the surface of Mars itself. A lander bound for Mars would need to be capable of atmospheric entry and subsequent return to orbit, without any support facilities (a capacity that has never been attempted in a manned spacecraft), or would require the creation of support facilities in-situ (a "colony or bust" mission); a lander intended for Phobos could be based on equipment designed for lunar and asteroid landings. Additionally, the delta-v to land on Phobos and return is only 80% of that for a trip to and from the surface of the Moon, partly due to Phobos's very weak gravity.

The human exploration of Phobos could serve as a catalyst for the human exploration of Mars and be scientifically valuable in its own right.

Most recently, it was proposed that the sands of Phobos could serve as a valuable material for aerobraking in the colonization of Mars. Because of the small delta-v budget of Phobos, a small amount of chemical fuel brought from Earth could be used to lift a very large amount of sand from the surface of Phobos, from a permanent outpost to a transfer orbit. This sand could be released in front of the spacecraft during the descent maneuver and then resulting in a densification of the atmosphere just in front of the spacecraft.>>

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 7:43 pm
by neufer
Chris Peterson wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:41 pm
sillyworm 2 wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:20 pm
FEwood wrote: Sun Nov 08, 2020 2:14 pm
There's no way it crashes into Mars in 50 million years. Think of all the people it would kill if we allowed that to happen. No, it will be towed away and mined sometime in the next thousand years.
I thought the same prior to finishing your paragraph.Would it be possible to haul it away?
Ignoring the fact that it's probably pretty worthless, it would be a poor choice for mining in any case, unless it was to build some kind of structure in Mars orbit.
A Death Star :?: :<<Phobos (Ancient Greek: Φόβος, meaning "fear") is the personification of fear and panic in Greek mythology. Phobos was the son of Mars & Venus. In Classical Greek mythology, Phobos is more of a personification of the fear brought by war.>>
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There will be rock blasting with nuclear explosives in space for both scientific & engineering purposes (e.g. building underground caverns for habitation & most mining).

Rock blasting with nuclear explosives will also be used as an efficient means of propulsion for asteroids & small moons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare wrote: <<Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes. As part of the program, 31 nuclear warheads were detonated in 27 separate tests. Plowshare was the US portion of what are called Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE). Successful demonstrations of non-combat uses for nuclear explosives include rock blasting and probing the composition of the Earth's deep crust, creating reflection seismology vibroseis data which has helped geologists and follow-on mining company prospecting.

The project's uncharacteristically large and atmospherically vented Sedan nuclear test also led geologists to determine that Barringer crater was formed as a result of a meteor impact and not from a volcanic eruption, as had earlier been assumed. This became the first crater on Earth definitely proven to be from an impact event.>>

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 8:00 pm
by VictorBorun
Phobosians will find a way to keep their home in orbit.

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 8:11 pm
by Labsnark
Just an observation - this photo looks MUCH cooler in portrait format!

Re: APOD: Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express (2020 Nov 08)

Posted: Sun Nov 08, 2020 8:15 pm
by ta152h0
Bummer - I can't wait 50 million years; my batteries will die before then! Pass the ice cold one.