As I promised a little while back, the European Space Agency has released new extremely high-res pictures of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars! Check this out:

Yegads. Click to embiggen, and see this in all its glory. This image, taken by the Mars Express spacecraft, has a resolution of 4.4 meters per pixel, meaning objects about the size of a two-car garage can be seen on the surface of Phobos. For comparison, this lumpy, battered moon (named for the Greek word for fear, a companion to Mars) is 27x22x19 kilometers (16x13x11 miles), so even though it’s on the tiny side, this is still a fantastic map of the surface.

And an important one as well: next year, Russia will be launching a probe called Phobos-Grunt (Phobos soil) that will attempt to land on the moon, collect a sample of its surface, and send it back to Earth! These images of Phobos will help the Russians figure out the best place to land.

On the ESA page linked above, you’ll also find a cool 3D anaglyph of Phobos, and if you want to stay up to date on all this, check out the Mars Express blog, too.

Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Over the next few weeks, the European probe Mars Express will be making a series of close passes to the Martian moon Phobos, a wrecked potato that has had an extensively battered history. In January, ME got this shot (among others):

You can see that this little moon has been kicked around quite a bit. Those parallel grooves are still a bit of a mystery; they are most likely cracks that formed when Phobos got whacked, creating the 10-km-wide crater Stickney on one end, but that matter is not 100% settled. Maybe these new observations will help end the debate. [UPDATE: Commenter Big Bob points out that the cracks are most likely not due to the Stickney impact! I haven't kept up on my Phobos groovy research, obviously. Also, in the next bit I say more images are coming, but in fact this close passage of Phobos will not yield very high-res pictures, because this flyby is to measure the gravity field around Mars, and the other instruments -- including the cameras -- must be turned off. Oh well.]

And as nice as this image is, we’ll be getting lots better ones soon! So this is a heads-up: closest approach is on March 3, so stayed tuned for more pictures. I’ll post ‘em as I see ‘em.

1) The new Carnival of Space is up at Lab Lemming’s tent, and it’s a BIG tent.

2) Emily has news that Phobos is a bit lighter than previously thought. What a pile.

3) Emily also has some nifty new MESSENGER images explained. I’ve been too lazy to deal with that.

4) Tom notes that HiRISE spotted Spirit on Mars. Massively embiggenated version is here.

4) This is dumb. So why did it make me smile so much? Oh right: I’m a dork.