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Mars Express to rendezvous with Martian moon   An image of Phobos by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera on board Mars Express on 10 January 2007. The larger and inner of the two martian moons is seen here floating just above the martian limb. The image has been enhanced slightly to bring out the detail on the moon.  This image, taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, is one of the highest-resolution pictures so far of the Martian moon Phobos. The image shows the Mars-facing side of the moon, taken from a distance of less than 200 kilometres with a resolution of about seven metres per pixel during orbit 756, on 22 August 2004.
This colour image was calculated from the three colour channels and the nadir channel on the HRSC. Due to geometric reasons the scale bar is only valid for the centre of the image.  An image of Phobos by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera on board Mars Express on 22 January 2007. The larger and inner of the two martian moons is seen here floating just above the martian limb. The image has been enhanced slightly to bring out the detail on the moon.  The animated sequence shows the shadow of Phobos transiting Mars' disk on 24 February; the sequence was captured around 22:08 CET, a few hours prior to Rosetta's successful Mars swingby on 25 February. The movie was produced by combining a series of separate images. The background of Mars changes slightly from image to image since the individual images were acquired using different colour filters. Release date: 22 September 2008 |