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Deimos
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When you start the second episode of Doom "The Shores of Hell" you are at the base in a crater on Deimos ("DEE mos"), the smaller of the two moons of Mars. But you are not near mars at all, in fact you are actually on the shores of hell, as you see on the victory screen at the end of the episode. The 9 levels consist of laboratories, towers and fortresses which you have to fight your way through. |
Deimos was discovered in 1877 by A.Hall (1829-1907) an American astronomer who used a new reactor with 65cm objective at the Washington Observatory. Deimos is 23,459 km away from Mars. It's dimensions are 16 x 12 x 10 km, the shape of Deimos is not round like most moons but rather a bent potato shape, it has been speculated that it was a meteorite that got caught in the gravitational Field of Mars. The surface of Deimos is covered with craters and a layer of rock and dust, known as regolith, made from impacts from meteorite in the past, but from a distance it looks relatively smooth. Deimos weighs 1.8e15 kg, it revolves around Mars once every 30 hours and 18 minutes. Deimos is the smallest celestial body to be explored to date (1988). |
Photo taken from Viking 1 in 1977 |
Landscape of Deimos against Hell as pictured in Doom |
The moon was named Deimos (Terror) after the myological companions of the god of war. It has been photographed by Viking 1, which was launched on August 20, 1975 and in 1977 took photos of Deimos before sending its lander to the surface of Mars to search for Martian micro-organisms. |
Bibliography
Web:
·Deimos
Book:
·The Hamlyn Encyclopedia of Stars & Planets, by Antonin Rükl, edited by Storm Dunlop, Published by The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, a division of the Octopus Publishing Group PLC, 1988.
·Geographica, Published by Gordon Cheers and Random House Australia, 1999
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