The Ultimate Phobos 2 Guide

have always been Intrigued by Mars and it’s mysteries, as well as its mysterious moon Phobos.

Of course I have also always wondered, along with Half the world what really did happen to the Russian space probe Phobos 2.

The official version is computer malfunction but to many things don’t "compute" for that to be true.

I found a very comprehensive write up  about the whole  incident here.

Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars, has itself always been considered a rather mysterious object, as has its smaller twin, Deimos. Joseph Shklovskii noted member of the Soviet Academy of science and co-writer with Dr Carl Sagan of ‘Intelligent life in the unverse’, once calculated from the estimated density of the Martian atmosphere and the peculiar "acceleration" of Phobos, that the satellite must be hollow. Could Phobos be a hollowed-out space station of huge proportions?

An interesting theory, that also concedes with the very strange shape the moon has.

 Phobos 2 arrived safely at Mars in January 1989 and entered into and orbit around Mars as the first step at its destination towards its ultimate goal: to transfer to an orbit that the would make it fly almost in tandem with the Martian moonlet called Phobos (hence the spacecrafts name) and explore the moonlet with highly sophisticated equipment that included two packages of instruments to be placed on the moonlet’s surface.

All went well until Phobos aligned itself with Phobos, the Martian moonlet. Then, on 28th March, the Soviet mission control centre acknowledged sudden communication "problems" with the spacecraft; nd Tass the, the official Soviet news agency, reported that "Phobos 2 had failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact."

Only after pressure from the other international participants in the Phobos 2 program did the Soviets release a clip of the last photos taken by Phobos 2.

These were aired on Canadian and European news magazines as a curiosity and not as a news item.

The television sequence thus released focused on two anomalies. The first was a network of straight lines in the area of the Martian equator;…

Arranged in rows parallel to each other, the pattern covered an area of some six hundred square kilometers

This in no way could be thought of as natural both because of  the formation of the shapes and because the photos were taken buy an infrared camera that captures energy or heat releases.

Since no coordinates for the precise location of this "anomalous feature" have been released publicly, it is impossible to judge its relationship to another puzzling feature on the surface of Mars that can be seen in Mariner 9 frame 4209-75. It is also located in the equatorial area (at longitude 186.4) and has been described as "unusual indentations with radial arms protruding from a central hub" , caused (according to NASA scientists) by the melting and collapse of permafrost layers. The design of the features, bringing to mind the structure of a modern airport with a circular hub from which long structures housing the airplane gates radiate, can be better visualized when the photograph is reversed (showing depressions and protrusions).

Also an unusual photo of a marquise shaped shadow on the surface of Mars was shown.

It was certainly different from the shadow of Phobos recorded eighteen years earlier by Mariner 9.

Nobody seems able to explain this phenomena  - some say it was maybe a weapon launnched agains Phobos 2

with the moon phobos acctualy being a mother ship.

All these reasons explain why the Soviets have not suggested that the dark, "thin ellipse" might have been a shadow of the moonlet. While the image was held on the screen, Dr. Becklake explained that it was taken as the spacecraft was aligning itself with Phobos (the moonlet). "As the last picture was halfway through," he said, "they [Soviets] saw something that should not be there." The Soviets, he went on to state, have not yet released this last picture, and we wont speculate on what it shows.

So was it that collided or crashed into Phobos 2? Was the space probe shot out of space for "seeing too much"? What does the last secret frame show?