PHOBOS: THE MONOLITH, THE LOST PROBE, AND THE MYSTERY OF MARS' MOON

Phobos It isn't particularly impressive in terms of size. It is a small, irregular moon, barely 27 kilometers across at its widest point, that orbits extremely close to Mars. It is covered in dust, craters, and huge rocks, and is gradually drawing closer to the planet. NASA It is estimated that in about 50 million years, it will either collide with Mars or be torn apart by gravitational forces and turned into a ring.

But a photograph taken in 1998 made one spot on its surface much more famous.

During one of the approaches to Mars Global Surveyor, the camera captured several gigantic blocks on Phobos. Near the center of one of those images, a particularly large one appears, standing alone and casting a considerable shadow. NASA estimates that it measures approximately 85 meters in diameter. Over time, he became known as The Phobos Monolith.

It is not an object hidden in a secret photograph. The image was released by NASA, and the boulder is visible there. For scientists, the most likely explanation is geological: Phobos is covered in enormous rocks, and many of them may have been hurled into space during the impact that created Stickney, the gigantic crater that dominates much of the small moon. But Phobos already had a strange history long before that photograph was taken.

In the late 1950s, the renowned Soviet astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky He was studying the orbital motion of Phobos. The calculations available at the time seemed to indicate that its orbit was changing in a way that was difficult to explain solely by the thin Martian atmosphere.

Shklovsky took the problem to an extraordinary conclusion. If those measurements were correct, Phobos would have to have an extremely low density. He even considered the possibility that it might be hollow and man-made.

He wasn't a science fiction writer. Shklovsky He was one of the great Soviet astrophysicists of his time and later became a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The hypothesis did not stand up to further observations. More accurate measurements and new models made it possible to explain the orbital behavior without having to treat Phobos as an artificial structure. Today we also know that Mars’ tidal forces are causing the moon to slowly approach the planet. But the idea had already gone down in history. Thirty years later, another episode occurred.

In 1988, the Soviet Union launched two probes, Phobos 1 and Phobos 2, designed to study Mars and, in particular, its mysterious moon. The first mission was lost during the journey due to a command error. Phobos 2 managed to reach Mars and began transmitting data.

In March of 1989, as it was preparing to approach Phobos, communication with the spacecraft deteriorated and was eventually lost. The technical explanation was a malfunction in the onboard computer. But the images obtained during its final days of operation told a completely different story.

The famous Soviet female pilot Marina Popovich, a colonel and one of the first women to break the sound barrier, later presented to the public a photograph that, she claimed, came from Phobos 2. It showed an elongated shape near the Martian moon.

Popovich He linked that image to the loss of the spacecraft, and the photograph began to circulate around the world as the alleged “Phobos object”.

Decades later, controversy still surrounds that interpretation. Subsequent analyses suggest that the elongated shape can be explained as an artifact produced by the probe’s own infrared imaging system. Furthermore, it was not literally the last photograph transmitted by Phobos 2: There are more images.

That doesn't change the historical fact: The Soviet spacecraft reached Mars, photographed Phobos, and contact with it was subsequently lost. The association between the subject of the photograph and the disappearance is part of the interpretation later put forward by Popovich and other researchers.

Then came Buzz Aldrin. The second person to walk on the Moon He spoke publicly about the strange block of Phobos and he used the very word that would eventually make him world-famous: “monolith”.

Aldrin He argued that someday humans should visit that small moon and see what was there. For years, his statements were taken out of context to imply that he was referring to an extraterrestrial structure. In reality, when you hear his full explanation, Aldrin attributes the object to natural causes. But the perception remains.

A block of about 85 meters photographed against a small moon whose origin is still under investigation. An old scientific hypothesis that once considered Phobos to be artificial. A lost Soviet mission. A controversial photograph presented by one of the Soviet Union’s most famous female pilots. And one of the men who walked on the Moon, publicly stating that we should go there.

Phobos It continues to orbit Mars about three times a day. The monolith is still there.