Mars Express Phobos minigallery

Between 23 July and 15 September 2008 Mars Express performed a series of eight fly-bys of the martian moon Phobos, at distances ranging between 4500 and 93 km from the centre of the moon, conducting some of the most detailed investigations of the Moon to date. In observing Phobos, Mars Express benefits from its highly elliptical orbit which takes it from a closest Mars approach of 270 km above the surface up to a maximum of 10 000 km distant from the planet's centre, crossing the 9 400 km orbit of the moon. Like our Moon, Phobos always shows the same side to the planet, so it is only by flying outside the orbit that it becomes possible to observe the far side. The other spacecraft presently orbiting Mars do so at much lower altitudes, and therefore only see the planet-facing side of the moon.

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Caption: Striking close-up on Phobos Credits: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum) ID number: SEMDDUSG7MF HI-RES JPEG size: 545 kb HI-RES TIFF size: 1050 kb Related Images: Solar System Mars Express

Description

This striking close-up image of Phobos was obtained by the Super Resolution Channel (or SRC, a part of the High Resolution Stereo Camera experiment) on board ESA’s Mars Express on 26 July 2008 (orbit 5861). The distance from the moon’s centre was 2295 km, and the image resolution is 20 m/pixel.

The Super Resolution Channel (SRC), is an additional camera sharing HRSC’s processing electronics. Unlike HRSC, SRC is a framing camera, taking a complete image during a single exposure like a conventional pocket camera. Its 975 mm Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope gives it a pixel-resolution about four times higher than that of HRSC.

Early in the mission, the thermal conditions of the instrument in space caused a distortion in its precision optics. This resulted in a performance lower than expected, with some blur and ghosting visible in the raw images. However, a significant part of the degradation has now been compensated for by analysing the effect of the distortion on test images (with point-like stars as target) and applying a corrective processing.

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