Spacecraft Buzzes Martian Moon Phobos : Big Pic

This is why I always say we are witnessing the most important moments of our civilization. We will be making a lot of huge steps in the next 10-20 years. Those are quite unimaginable from today's standpoint... I feel proud to be living in this era.


Spacecraft Buzzes Martian Moon Phobos : Big Pic

http://news.discovery.com/space/big-pic-esa-mars-express-phobos-flyby-110126.html

Jan. 26, 2011 -- In what mission scientists are calling an "exceptional flyby," the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter has taken stunning close-up photographs of Mars' largest moon Phobos.

Flying within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the moon's surface in Jan. 9, the body's countless craters can be seen in detail. Although this isn't the sharpest set of photographs taken by a spacecraft passing Phobos, the new pictures capture the previous and current planned landing sites of the ambitious Russian Phobos-Grunt mission.

To be launched later this year, Phobos-Grunt is a sample return mission that will land on Phobos. It is hoped the spacecraft will land on the surface and scoop up a macroscopic sample and return it to Earth. This will be the first sample return mission to a planetary body since the 1976 Soviet Luna 24 mission. (The Japanese Hayabusa mission returned samples from an asteroid in 2010, but the samples recovered were microscopic grains of dust.)

Using data gathered from these new images, mission scientists hope to refine the Phobos-Grunt landing site by creating high-resolution topographic maps of the area.