Mission to ... Phobos?

According to NASA scientists, the next planetary body visited by humans in our solar system could be one of Mars' tiny moons: Phobos.

"They are the most accessible planetary bodies in our solar system," said Pascal Lee of the Mars Institute (...) "It's counterintuitive, but they're even easier to get to than Earth's Moon (...)"

The reason for this is that for reaching the Moon, which is much larger (and bears a stronger gravitational pull) a landing spacecraft would need to fire its retro-rockets for landing, and taking off -- wasting tonnes of precious fuel. However this is not the case with Phobos and Deimos, as they are very small with Phobos being only 10km wide and Deimos being 6km in size.

An article over at NewScientist details the aspects of such manned (and unmanned) missions, stating that mankind could set its foot on the moon's surface within ten years.

Let's just hope that NASA is not into interdimensional travel yet.

Doesn't this belong in "Everything Else"?

Yeah... I don't think this could quite be stretched on to the front page.

They're probably then safest moons in our galaxy to visit, besides our own. If things mess up, there's handfuls of soul sphere's laying around.

I wouldnt want to set foot on either of those two moons, one "over enthusiastic" step over a rock and you'd reach escape velocity...

If you think Phobos sounds wild, I remember seeing a video on Space.com a while back talking about a manned mission to a comet. They actually made it sound plausible, too.

I remember some sci-fi show where some space marine type guys stopped there and one of them tossed a football which just sailed over the horizon.

deathbringer said:

uhhhhhhhhhh

I wouldnt want to set foot on either of those two moons, one "over enthusiastic" step over a rock and you'd reach escape velocity...

Maybe it's definitely unlikely, but I wouldn't wish any of those moons to reach itself escape velocity.

I'm guessing some kind of personal thruster system would be necessary to keep them from flying off into space. Either that or Iron Boots ala Zelda. Though I'm not clear on exactly how heavy they'd need to be to work :P

We need to be working on such things anyway if we ever intend to mine the vast resources of the asteroid belt ^_^

Or intend on opening gates to hell.

I think it would be kinda neat looking up into the sky and seeing nothing but Mars hovering over. Think the light reflected off Mars would give the surface a rusty glow?