LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Phobos
built 655 days ago
Phobos was a Soviet mission to Mars consisting of 2 nearly identical spacecraft. The mission included cooperation from 14 other nations including Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, France, West Germany, and the United States (who contributed the use of its Deep Space Network for tracking the twin spacecraft). The objectives of the dual mission were to 1) conduct studies of the interplanetary environment, 2) perform observations of the Sun, 3) characterize the plasma environment in the Martian vicinity, 4) conduct surface and atmospheric studies of Mars, and 5) study the surface composition of the Martian satellite Phobos. In support of these objectives, the mission was to perform the first close scientific investigation of and landing on another planet's moon. In addition to their on-board instrument complement, each vehicle carried a lander designed to land on Phobos' surface and perform a number of in-situ measurements. Phobos 2 ... carried a second, smaller "hopper" lander designed to land on Phobos and then use its spring loaded legs to move ("hop") about the moon's surface to make chemical, magnetic and gravity observations at different locations.
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A remarkable feature on Phobos is a (relatively) large impact crater, named Stickney after the maiden name of Mrs Hall. Streaks on the surface of Phobos indicate that the satellite was almost shattered by the impact. Deimos and Phobos are thought to be captured asteroids, but an accepted (and complete) theory of their origin is still missing. Whatever its origin, Phobos will have an end: its orbit is shrinking by 1.8 cm per year. Thus, Phobos could either crash into Mars or break up to leave a ring of fragments in less than 100 million years time.
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Phobos has an orbital radius of 9380 km with an eccentricity of almost unity. The shape of Phobos is a triaxial ellipsoid with semi-major axes of 13.4, 11.2, and 9.2 km. It has a gravitational constant m = 660 km3/s2. Surface temperature has been measured to be 305 K on the lit side and 190 K on the dark side. The surface radiation coefficient of Phobos is 0.9. Mean density is estimated to be 1900 kg/m3. It has been speculated that the carbonaceous chondrite material on Phobos may contain up to 20% water and 5% carbon.
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Phobos has cone shaped rocks (cuspids) throughout Phobos imaged in sp255103. the image in the upper left hand corner in the panel of images above shows a particularly pointed object. What's curious is that there is no weathering/erosion process to create this feature.
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Phobos gives you what other scripting languages do not: access to the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) stack. As the first article in this series has pointed out, scripting languages and statically typed languages such as the Java programming language have their own strengths. When you use Phobos to create web applications, you can use scripting and Java technology in ways that take advantage of their strengths. And because Phobos runs on the Java EE platform, you can call into components of the Java EE stack. For example, from your Phobos application, you can call into the new and powerful Java Persistence API available as part of the Java EE platform.
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Remarkably, Phobos appeared first in fiction (although unnamed) before it was discovered in reality. In the third part of chapter 3 of Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the astronomers of Laputa are said to have discovered two satellites of Mars (see Jonathan Swift and the moons of Mars. In his Barsoom novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs calls Phobos by the local name Thuria, and is describes it as "a great and glorious orb, swinging swift across the vaulted dome of the blue-black night, so low that she seemed to graze the hills" (The Chessmen of Mars). John Carter of Mars visits a miniature civilization on Thuria in the novel Swords of Mars. Phobos ... features in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy as the site of a base built by the first Mars colonists.
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