Phobos Moon over Planet Mars | Europe's Mars Express

Phobos Moon over Planet Mars | Europe's Mars Express

This colorized image was created using data processed from the European Space Agency's Planetary Science Archive of images obtained by its Mars Express orbiter. This is a single shot, not a composite image. The waviness of the Martian surface is a visual distortion from the camera's line-scanning method, caused by differences in motion between foreground and background objects.

Phobos is a small, irregularly shaped object with a mean radius of 11 km (7 mi). Phobos orbits 6,000 km (3,700 mi) from the Martian surface, closer to its primary body than any other known planetary moon. It is so close that it orbits Mars much faster than Mars rotates, and completes an orbit in just 7 hours and 39 minutes. As a result, from the surface of Mars it appears to rise in the west, move across the sky in 4 hours and 15 minutes or less, and set in the east, twice each Martian day.

Phobos is one of the least reflective bodies in the Solar System, with an albedo of just 0.071. Surface temperatures range from about −4 °C (25 °F) on the sunlit side to −112 °C (−170 °F) on the shadowed side. The defining surface feature is the large impact crater, Stickney, which takes up a substantial proportion of the moon's surface. The surface is also home to many grooves, with there being numerous theories as to how these grooves were formed.
[Source: Wikipedia]

Nearly twenty-two years ago, on June 2, 2003, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter launched and began its journey to the Red Planet—Europe’s first ever mission to Mars. The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars in December 2003. It used its vantage point to study the martian atmosphere and climate, unravel the planet’s structure, mineralogy and geology, and search for traces of water across its surface. The mission carried a state-of-the-art package of eight instruments to achieve this, enabling it to probe surface, subsurface, atmosphere and more.

Mars Express has now been in space for over two decades, despite a planned initial lifetime of just 687 Earth days. It has achieved its aforementioned aims and revealed a wealth of knowledge about Mars in that time, making it undeniably one of the most successful missions ever sent to the Red Planet.

The orbiter will continue its study of Mars until at least the end of 2026, with a special extension from January 1, 2027 to December 31, 2028 to support the JAXA-led Mars Moons eXploration (MMX) mission (Japan), followed by two years of post-operations.

Mars Express has conducted data relay for seven rovers and landing platforms (more information), and enabled scientific collaboration with a further five orbiters.

The past 20 years of observations from Mars Express have solidified our picture of Mars as a once-habitable planet, with warmer and wetter epochs that may have been oases for ancient life. 

Image Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck

Link: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Image Capture Date: May 31, 2014
Release Date: March 7, 2025

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