30-04-09 Focused on Phobos

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 kilometers 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 planet’s surface by a large asteroid or comet impact.Whatever their origins,in terms of space missions the moons have been overshadowed by the planet they orbit.If a spacecraft is sent on a 6-month journey of many millions of miles,it seems anti-climatic to have it plop down on a tiny asteroid-like body when Mars itself is so close,beckoning with its many different regions to explore and a complex history to unravel.Russian scientists,however,have been trying to send a spacecraft to Phobos,the larger of the two Mars moons,for many years.Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 were launched within 5 days of each other in July 1988.Phobos 1 lost communications due to a software glitch that September,but Phobos 2 had better luck and made it all the way to Mars orbit.Before the spacecraft could send its two probes to Phobos,however,the spacecraft’s signal was lost due to a computer malfunction.The Russian Federal Space Agency proposed sending a new mission to Phobos in 1999.Called Phobos-Grunt (“grunt” being the Russian word for “soil”),this mission aims to gather a sample of soil from the moon’s surface and send it back to Earth for analysis.Although an unmanned sample return mission sounds complicated,the Russian space program has succeeded many times in conducting similar missions closer to home