Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Phobos Monolith

The Phobos monolith is a surface feature, a large rock, on the moon Phobos which orbits Mars. 
It is a boulder about 85 meters (~280 feet) across. 
A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock. Monoliths also occur naturally on Earth, but it has been suggested that the Phobos monolith may be a piece of impact ejecta.


The monolith is a bright object near Stickney crater, described as a "building sized" boulder, which casts a prominent shadow. 
It was discovered by Efrain Palermo, who did large surveys of Martian probe imagery, and later confirmed by Lan Fleming, an imaging sub-contractor at NASA Johnson Space Center. The general vicinity of the monolith is a proposed landing site for a Canadian Space Agency vehicle, funded by Optech and the Mars Institute, for an unmanned mission to Phobos known as PRIME (Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration). The PRIME mission would be composed of an orbiter and lander, and each would carry four instruments designed to study various aspects of Phobos' geology. At present, PRIME has not been funded and does not have a projected launch date. The object appears in Mars Global Surveyor images SPS252603 and SPS255103, dated 1998. The object is unrelated to another monolith located on the surface of Mars, which NASA noted as an example of a common surface feature in that region.


No comments: