Posted on Friday 12 November 2004

Phobos means fear and, frankly, the larger of Mars' two moons has plenty to worry about. It is on a downward spiral, slowly descending towards the Martian surface. Within 100 million years the moon will be torn apart by the tidal force of Mar's gravity and form a short-lived ring before raining down as massive meteor shower upon the Martian surface.

The ESA has just released this new image of the moon which shows it with unprecedented detail. The image was taken with the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. The image on the website shows the 3D as a red-blue anaglyph which needs to be viewed with red-blue glasses. I know a lot of people don't have these handy so I have taken the liberty to separate out the colours and reconstitute them as two separate images which can be viewed in three dimensions by the cross-eye method.

As usual all caveats apply. If you break your eyes looking at these images, you own both halves.

The main idea to understand about this picture in 3D is that this moon is not round. It was probably originally captured by Mars from the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter.