Martian moon Phobos in detail

[Rose]

It`s very good with the 3D glasses on.

[Rick]

Some 135 years after its discovery, Mars' largest moon Phobos is seen in fantastic detail – and in 3D – in an image taken by ESA's Mars Express spacecraft as it passed just 100 km by.

In this image, a bite-sized chunk appears to be missing from the right edge of the irregular shaped moon – this is a side-on view of the rim of large impact crater Stickney, so-called after the maiden name of the discoverer's wife.

More: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMDAB1YZ5H_index_0.html

[Rick]

Mars' Moon Phobos is Slowly Falling Apart

The long, shallow grooves lining the surface of Phobos are likely early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon of Mars.

Orbiting a mere 3,700 miles (6,000 kilometers) above the surface of Mars, Phobos is closer to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Mars' gravity is drawing in Phobos, the larger of its two moons, by about 6.6 feet (2 meters) every hundred years. Scientists expect the moon to be pulled apart in 30 to 50 million years.

"We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves," said Terry Hurford of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

More: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/phobos-is-falling-apart

[Canadian Roger]

I was able to image both Phobos and Deimos in 2003 with a Philips webcam and a Meade 16" SCT a couple of weeks after the great opposition that year.  I tried again in 2005, but only caught Deimos.

I expect it will be a little easier at the opposition in May next year (with Mars about 18 arc-seconds in diameter) due to the vastly improved sensors and software in the intervening years.

[Rick]

Does Mars Have Rings? Not Right Now, But Maybe One Day

As children, we learned about our solar system's planets by certain characteristics -- Jupiter is the largest, Saturn has rings, Mercury is closest to the sun. Mars is red, but it's possible that one of our closest neighbors also had rings at one point and may have them again someday.

That's the theory put forth by NASA-funded scientists at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, whose findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience. David Minton and Andrew Hesselbrock developed a model that suggests that debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping together to form a moon.

More: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6781