Mars Express was launched by the European Space Agency in 2003, and is ESA’s first Mars mission. In one shot, you can see Mars as a half-lit disk, with Phobos, its tiny moon, hovering above. Right below Phobos is Olympus Mons, the solar system's largest volcano, towering 22 km high and 600 km across—or as the Bad Astronomer says, “about the size of Colorado”.
Posted by Andrea Luck, by way of Bad Astronomy.
Mars' inner moon Phobos appears far darker than the bright clouds of Mars in this view taken by the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission on October 14, 2014. Image by Emily Lakdawalla for Planetary Society.
We mentioned these guys a week or so ago. But they just finished Moon May which is a series of animated videos that explore our moon, Mars’ moons, Neptune’s moon Triton and the Pluto system.
Nice full color image of Deimos, Mars’s smaller of two moons. There is a second one as well if you go to the NASA site and check out the hi-res link. I would say that this is now the definitive best image yet aquired of this body to date.
Was reminded of this image in the current issue of The Planetary Report. It was taken by Mars Express in 2007 and is featured in a current article about the excellent Russian Phobos-Grunt mission planned for 2009. This mission marks a return to planetary exploration for the Russian space program and does so in a big way. The plan is to land on the Martian moon Phobos – take samples of its surface and return them back to Earth. Sample return missions are technically very difficult and in all of history the number of attempts numbers in the single digits.
This is a semi-false color image as explained on NASA’s site, “The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this image of the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos… on March 23, 2008. Taken from a distance of about 6,800 kilometers (about 4,200 miles). It is presented in color by combining data from the camera's blue-green, red, and near-infrared channels”.
So there is some exaggeration of color here by including the infrared. I am guessing that is what is making the contrast between the reddish hues and those whitish marking at the edge of Stickney Crater. Click to see the hi-res… this may be the sharpest most detailed of Phobos I have seen yet.
Found these images of the Martian moon being tossed about like loose change on unmannedspaceflight.com last week. Don’t think I have ever seen any of these. They are from the ESA Mars Express mission currently in orbit around Mars.
This one is in hi-res…
Phobos, moon of Mars.
Deimos, moon of Mars.
Mimas, moon of Saturn.