The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 14, 2010

Official News page 5


REAL LIFE NEWS: CLOSE PHOBOS FLYBY

by Hazed

The European spacecraft Mars Express skimmed past Mars' moon Phobos last week at a distance that was the closest any manmade object has come to the oddly-shaped piece of rock - just 42 miles.

This flyby was intended to capture "the most exquisite data yet about the gravitational field of Phobos" by detecting the "subtle variations" in radio waves beamed from Earth to the spacecraft and then bounced back to receivers on the ground.

This will enable scientists to figure out the exact nature of the moon. It's thought to be a second-generation "rubble pile" which "coalesced in orbit after Mars formed, rather than forming concurrently out of the same birth cloud as the red planet."

In the past, observations have shown that Phobos is not dense enough to be a solid ball of rock, and therefore must be made up of around 25-30% voids between component blocks of stuff.

How appropriate that Tracy, whose brain is pretty much a void, should live on a moon made up of voids!

You can read more about this close flyby, and see some new pictures taken of the moon, here.


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