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: Details of Phobos' surface Credits: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum) ID number: SEM0KUSG7MF HI-RES JPEG size: 486 kb HI-RES TIFF size: 3115 kb Related Images: Solar System Mars Express

Description

This series of images was obtained by the Super Resolution Channel (SRC) (left and centre of the panel) and by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC, right of the panel) on board ESA’s Mars Express. The images were gathered on 28 July 2008 (orbit 5870), at a distance of 351 km from the moon’s centre. The two SRC images show a resolution of 3.2 m/pixel, while the HRSC one has a resolution of 14 m/pixel.

The left SRC image is raw (shown as it has been collected), while the centre SRC one has been corrected for mirror distortion. The right image is a portion of the HRSC image taken using the nadir channel and showing the same portion of the surface imaged by SRC. The latter shows significantly more detail than the HRSC nadir image.

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