One Of The More Interesting Places In The Solar System
Mars Orbiter To Investigate 'Lumpy Potato' Moon
"Phobos is a bit of an enigma. It looks like a lumpy potato, barely 17 miles across. Its small size and low orbit around Mars once made people wonder if it wasn't a moon at all, but a space station put in orbit by an advanced Martian civilization.
Now scientists are reasonably sure it is a moon, but they'd like to know more about it.
Since the end of February, the Mars Express spacecraft has been orbiting ever closer to the tiny moon.
The closest approach will have the spacecraft a mere 42 miles from the surface, but instead of taking pictures, scientists will monitor radio signals from the spacecraft as it flies by. Tiny shifts in frequency will be caused by changes in the gravitational pull of Phobos ... and those changes can be used to measure the distribution of mass inside the moon."
Aside from calculations that show the moonlet to be hollow, there was a mysterious encounter by a Russian space probe back in the 80s.
"The last transmission from Phobos 2 was a photograph of a gigantic cylindrical spaceship - a huge, apporx, 20km long, 1.5km diameter cigar-shaped 'mothership', that was photographed on 25 March 1989 hanging or parked next to the Martian moon Phobos by the Soviet unmanned sonde Phobos 2. After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to Earth, the probe mysteriously disappeared; according to the Russians it was destroyed - possibly knocked out with an energy pulse beam."
"Phobos is a bit of an enigma. It looks like a lumpy potato, barely 17 miles across. Its small size and low orbit around Mars once made people wonder if it wasn't a moon at all, but a space station put in orbit by an advanced Martian civilization.
Now scientists are reasonably sure it is a moon, but they'd like to know more about it.
Since the end of February, the Mars Express spacecraft has been orbiting ever closer to the tiny moon.
The closest approach will have the spacecraft a mere 42 miles from the surface, but instead of taking pictures, scientists will monitor radio signals from the spacecraft as it flies by. Tiny shifts in frequency will be caused by changes in the gravitational pull of Phobos ... and those changes can be used to measure the distribution of mass inside the moon."
Aside from calculations that show the moonlet to be hollow, there was a mysterious encounter by a Russian space probe back in the 80s.
"The last transmission from Phobos 2 was a photograph of a gigantic cylindrical spaceship - a huge, apporx, 20km long, 1.5km diameter cigar-shaped 'mothership', that was photographed on 25 March 1989 hanging or parked next to the Martian moon Phobos by the Soviet unmanned sonde Phobos 2. After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to Earth, the probe mysteriously disappeared; according to the Russians it was destroyed - possibly knocked out with an energy pulse beam."
posted by nolocontendere at 9:23 PM
2 Comments:
Phobos and Deimos are both asteroids that were captured in the orbit of Mars after the destruction of a fifth terrestrial planet, resulting also in the burning off of most of the Martian atmosphere.
That's the theory I favor.
Whatever happened, and whenever it happened, the solar system was quite different in the past.
Richard Hoagland's interpretation is that the same disaster you mention is the last extinction event 65 mill years ago. Velikovsky thinks it's much later than that and Sumerian understanding is even different. I believe it happened around the earth's upheaval 10 to 12 thousand years ago when the solar system's equilibrium was disrupted, resembling a billiard table, concurrently with the disintegration of the worldwide civilization that existed at the time.
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