Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

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Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Sirius_Alpha on Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:02 pm

Mars Express to rendezvous with Martian moon
http://www.physorg.com/news135434147.html

PhysOrg article wrote:Scientists and engineers are preparing ESA’s Mars Express for a pair of close fly-bys of the Martian moon Phobos. Passing within 100 km of the surface, Mars Express will conduct some of the most detailed investigations of the moon to date.


Here's the ESA page on it.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars_Express/SEMVGAWIPIF_0.html
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars_Express/SEMVGAWIPIF_1.html

Lots of pretty pictures o_O

Fly-by dates (looks like one already happened...)
DateClosest approach
12 July563 km
17 July273 km
23 July97 km
28 July361 km
3 August____
664 km

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Darkness nova on Thu Jul 17, 2008 9:23 pm

Nice.

Always nice to have new pictures of Phobos although personally I'd like to see some better pictures of diemos.

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Sirius_Alpha on Wed Jul 30, 2008 11:55 am

A picture has been released (the first of many I hope). It shows the proposed Phobos-Grunt landing site.

http://www.dlr.de/en/DesktopDefault.aspx/t.../86_read-13161/




(larger image)

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Sirius_Alpha on Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:56 pm

Finally, a nice clean version of the one above. No distortion!
(large file again)
http://esamultimedia.esa.int/images/marsexpress/401-20080729-5851-6-na-1a-Phobos-Flyby_H1.jpg

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by jyril on Wed Jul 30, 2008 2:57 pm

Not sure about cleanness... The high resolution imager of MEX suffers from serious noise, that's why we haven't seen many highest-resolution MEX images. Sad

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Sirius_Alpha on Thu Oct 16, 2008 8:12 pm

In today's wonderful world of completely accurate news reporting,
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/081016-mars-moon-rubble.html
Space.com wrote:Another team of researchers used radio signals from the spacecraft that vary based on the tug of Phobo's gravity to calculate the object's precise mass, and found that it weighs 1.0721016 kilograms (2.36357944 pounds), or about 1 billionth the mass of the Earth.


I'm not sure which to be more astounded by, the fact that the entire moon weighs just a kilo, or that we had instruments sensitive enough to determine that--all the way down to that level of accuracy!! Laughing

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Re: Mars Express to rendezvous with Phobos

Post by Lazarus on Fri Oct 17, 2008 3:44 pm

Looks like they've found their missing multiplication and raise-to-the-power-of signs...

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