Phobos

[jjohnson]

Photographing and mapping a tumbling, irregular moon like Mars' Phobos can't be an easy job.

Here is an interesting thread of this process by one individual, with a link to an ESA site that has some more good photos for your collection.

From the above I think that crater Stickney is a little less than half as large as the smallest diameter of Phobos, although it is certainly a sizable missing chunk. Of interest are the machined grooves and crater chains, of course, as seen on moons all over the solar system. Imagine if Pluto or, if imaged, one of its several moons, were found to have these features when the New Horizons spacecraft bombs past, snapping pictures and taking measurements as fast as possible in July 2015. If its atmosphere isn't covering the surface as snow, such features might be visible.

Jim

[tayga]

The imaging of Phobos is a triumph of space photography far outstripping the quality of the associated interpretation.

Imagine if Pluto or, if imaged, one of its several moons, were found to have these features when the New Horizons spacecraft bombs past, snapping pictures and taking measurements as fast as possible in July 2015. If its atmosphere isn't covering the surface as snow, such features might be visible.

I wonder how icy these 'icy' planets and moons will prove to be. I'm confidently predicting that the word 'surprise' or one of its derivatives will be in NASA's first press release concerning the encounter.

[dahlenaz]

What simple clues might we gleen from considering the similarities between the appearance
of Stickney crater and that of this image of an egg's interior, especially considering that we
still do not know how bodies in this solar system were formed?



http://para-az.com/subcrst-craters/stic ... e1115c.jpg

Stickney's present appearance may be only the latest surface etching,, well seperated
from a formative period when a sub-crust feature was formed... d...z

...

[tholden]

Hirise color image of Phobo, 2008:



Real moon and satellites are supposed to be made of rocks, dirt, and green cheese; they are not supposed to reflect light all over creation like that. Phobos is clearly made of metallic strakes, i.e. it' artificial. Aside from the mirror finish, there is also an anomaly associated with Phobos:



Google search on "phobos anomaly". Buzz Aldrin commented on the thing. Phobos has been known to be non-solid since the Eisenhower administration and the dawn of the space age. Richard Hoagland was saying that you could all but count the rivets in the early B/W images, but the HIRISE (Univ. Az.) color images pretty much seal it.