November 16, 2004
The Phobos Potato... Let's take five with Moira Gunn. This is "Five Minutes."
Mars has two moons, and we've finally gotten a good look at one of them. The European Space Agency's spacecraft — wonderfully titled the "Mars Express" — has taken the most detailed images ever of Phobos, the largest of Mars' two moons.
In some ways, it reads like a comic news report out of Saturday Night Live: "This just in. Photographs of the Mars' moon Phobos reveal it looks just like a potato. In fact, it may be a potato." Two beats, and then you see a real potato alongside a picture of Phobos. "Idaho has opened talks to acquire exclusive marketing rights for the new 'Phobos Potato.'"
Silliness aside, the Internet community is now downloading these pictures with great excitement. There is a large and growing body of individuals who are interested in these photos, and every space mission since the first Mars rover has had to plan for it. Today there are over a million photographs from every point in space we humans have been able to reach, and the demand shows no sign of slowing.
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The two moons of Mars were discovered by astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, and he named them Phobos and Deimos. Why he was motivated to choose these names lies in a nod to mythology: Mars — for whom the parent planet is named — is the Roman God of War, and his counterpart in Greek myth is the god Ares. The two sons of Ares are Phobos and Deimos — hence, the two moons are named for the sons of Mars.
In case you're wondering why Professor Hall didn't pick the equivalent Roman names, you will find that in Roman mythology Mars married his half-sister and had only one offspring — a daughter named Harmonia. Obviously, that just wouldn't do. But it does point out one thing that's really fun about science. To the victor belong the spoils, or rather to the discoverer belongs the name.
If you follow the news stories about these new Phobos pictures, you will learn that, after the potato lookalike phenomenon, its most striking feature is a crater which goes by the name of Stickney. No Greek or Roman mythology here. Nope, it was his wife's maiden name.
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All this hoopla some 125 years after Asaph Hall has gotten me to thinking. Wouldn't he just love to be alive today? Wouldn't he be thrilled to get up close and personal with the moons he discovered from his post at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington? Download incredible pictures? Masterplan missions of his own? We not only build better telescopes today; we send them out into space to get a real close look.
What is absolutely clear to me is that from the Greek and Roman myths, to the individual person of Asaph Hall, to the hundreds of thousands of us all over the world downloading these incredible pictures over the Internet — we humans have always been entranced with the night sky and the space beyond.
Roman and Greek mythology were both deeply entrenched with the stars that were visible, trying to match the gods and the unseen powers which seemed to control or drive human existence. Today, we ourselves look to the sky and space, asking questions which are eerily similar: What does our universe look like? What is our future? What is our fate?
While science and technology separates us possibly even more than the centuries between us, perhaps we're not so different, after all.
I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.
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