HaCKeRz KrOnIcKLeZ 3/HaCKeRz_KrOnIcKLeZ.iso/ufo2/phobos.txt

Text File | 1996-04-30 | 13KB | 245 lines

  "At most, terrestrial men fancied that there might be other
men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to
welcome a missionary enterprise."

- H.G. Wells, the War of the Worlds.


PHOBOS: MALFUNCTION OR EARLY "STAR WARS" INCIDENT?

  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 universe', 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?

  In July 1988, the Russians launched two unmanned satellite
probes - Phobos 1 and phobos 2 - in the direction of Mars, and
with the primary intention of investigating the planet's
mysterious moon, Phobos.

Phobos 1 was unfortunately lost en route two months later,
reportedly because of a radio command error. Phobos 2 was also
ultimately lost in the most intriguing circumstances, but not
before it had beamed back certain images and information from the
planet Mars itself.

  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; and Tass, 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."

  What had caused the Phobos 2 spacecraft to be lost? The answer
came about three months later. Pressed by the international
participants in the Phobos mission to privide definitive data,
the Soviet authorities released a taped television transmission
Phobos 2 sent in its last moments except for the last frames,
taken just seconds before the spacecraft fell silent. The
television clip was shown by some TV stations in Europe and
Canada as part of weekly 'diary' programs, as a curiosity and not
as a hot 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; some of the lines were short, some were longer,
some were thin, some were wide enough to look like rectangular
shapes 'embossed' in the Martian surface. Arranged in rows
parallel to each other, the pattern covered an area of some six
hundred square kilometers (more than two hundred and thirty
square miles). The anomaly appeared to be far from a natural
phenomenon.

  The television clip was accompanied by a live comment by Dr.
John Becklake of the London Science Museum. He described the
phenomenon as very puzzling, because the pattern seen on the
surface of Mars was not photographed with the spacecraft's
optical camera but with its infrared camera- a camera that takes
pictures of objects using the heat that they radiate, and not by
the play of light and shadow on them.  In other words, the
pattern of parallel lines and rectangles covering an area of
almost two hundred and fifty square miles was a source of heat
radiation. It is so highly unlikely that a natural source of heat
radiation (a geyser or a concentration of radioactive minerals
under the surface,) described by the Russian as "Quite remarkable
features". A report taken from New Scientist of 8 April 1989,
described the following: "The features are either on the Martian
surface or in the lower atmosphere. The features are between
20 and 25 kilometers wide and do not resemble any known
geological formation. They are spindle - shaped and proving to be
intriguing and puzzling."

  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).

A SHADOW ACROSS THE SURFACE OF MARS

  An unusual photo of a thin shadow across mars was shown on the
Russian television segment. Seem on the surface of Mars was a
clearly defined dark shape that could indeed be described, as it
was in the initial dispatch from Moscow,, as a "thin ellipse"
(this photo is a still from the Soviet television clip). It was
certainly different from the shadow of Phobos recorded eighteen
years earlier by Mariner 9. The latter cast a shadow that was a
rounded ellipse and fuzzy at the edges, as would be cast by the
uneven surface of the moonlet. The 'anomaly' seen in the Phobos 2
transmission was a thin ellipse with very sharp rather than
rounded points (the shape is known in the diamond trade as a
"marquise") and the edges, rather than being fuzzy, stood out
sharply against a kind of halo on the Martian surface. Dr.
Becklake described it as "something that is between the
spacecraft and Mars, because we can see the Martian surface
below it," and stressed that the object was seen by both the
optical and the infrared (heat seeking) camera.

  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 what 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? In his careful words to 'Aviation
Week and Space Technology', the chairman of the Soviet equivalent
of NASA, referred to the last frame, saying, "One image appears
to include an odd-shaped object between the spacecraft and Mars."

  This "highly secret" photo was later given to the Western press
by Colonel Dr. Marina Popovich, a Russian astronaut and pilot who
has long been interested in UFO's. At a UFO conference in 1991,
Popovich gave to certain investigators some interesting
information that she "smuggled" out of the now ex-Soviet Union.
Part of the information was what has been called "the first ever
leaked accounts of an alien mothership in the solar system".

  The last transmission from Phobos 2 was a photograph of a
gigantic cylindrical spaceship - a huge, apporx, 20km long, 1.5km
diameter cigar-shaped 'mothership', that was photographed on 25
March 1989 hanging or parked next to the Martian moon Phobos by
the Soviet unmanned sonde Phobos 2. After that last frame was
radio-transmitted back to Earth, the probe mysteriously
disappeared; according to the Russians it was destroyed -
possibly knocked out with an energy pulse beam.

  The cigar shaped craft in the penultimate frame taken by Phobos
2 is apparently the object science writer Brian Crowley says that
because of the convex catseye shadow - which, because the
overhead solar inclination prevented shadow- casting by Martian
surface features, implies a shadow thrown on the surface from
something in orbit - beyond the orbit of Phobos 2 itself. The
shadow - spindle- or cigar shaped - is inconsistent with any
possible shadow cast by the moon Phobos, which is an irregular
potato shape. One needs little imagination to postulate a giant,
hovering cigar-shaped mother craft similar to those documented
down the years by UFO investigators.

INFRARED PHOTOS OF AN UNDERGROUND CITY

  Another Phobos picture, released on Canadian TV, presents an
infrared scan radiometer image of the Martian surface that showed
clearly defined rectangular areas. These are interconnected with
a latticework of perfectly straight channels, much resembling a
city block. There were no corresponding surface features taken by
regular cameras. This suggests the heat signature of what may be
a set of underground cavern or channels that are just too
geometrically regular to be formed naturally. According to Dr.
John Becklake of the London Science Museum, "The city-like
pattern is 60 kilometers wide and could be easily be mistaken for
an aerial view of Los Angeles."

  The final picture taken by Phobos 2 before it was "shot out of
orbit" has never been publicly released. One report indicated
that it was presented at a closed meeting with US and British
officials.

  In the 19 October 1989 issue of "Nature', Soviet scientists
published a series of technical reports on the experiments Phobos
2 did manage to conduct: of the thirty seven pages, a mere
paragraph deal with the spacecrafts loss. The report confirms
that the spacecraft was spinning, either because of a computer
malfunction or because Phobos 2 was "impacted" by an unknown
object.

  And so we see that it is not only NASA that is apparently
involved in suppressing photographs and knowledge of other
planets, but the Russian space program as well.

CHAIN CRATERS OF PHOBOS

  In an interesting article in the January 1977 issue of
'Astronomy', entitled "Chain Craters of Phobos", the anonymous
author discusses the strange grooves and craters of Phobos:

  "Viking has discovered another mystery in the most unexpected
place - one of the two small Martian moons. Mariner 9's mapping
of Phobos (12x14x17 miles or 20x23x28 kilometers) and Deimos
(6x7x10 miles, or 10x12x16 kilometers) showed many craters, and
left most investigators that they were merely rocky chunks that
bore the scars of meteorite impacts. There was a puzzling feature
on Phobos that a few analysts noticed but, without better data,
could say little about.

   "A the limit of resolution were a few small crater pits that
seemed to align in one or two chains. This was unusual, because
crater chains on the moon were traditionally explained as
volcanic pits - small eruption sites string along fracture lines.
Yet Phobos apparently is too small to generate heat and
conventional volcanic activity.

  "Vikings high resolution photos have revealed that the crater
chains are real and part of an extensive system of parallel
grooves, a few hundred yards wide (shown in Viking orbiter photo
number 39B84).  There may be a tendency for the grooves to lie
parallel to the direction of the satellites orbital motion,
although there appears to be several swarms with somewhat
different orientations. Scientists are at a loss to explain them.
Theories being discussed include: grooves left by much smaller
satellite debris also orbiting Mars (though the grooves seem to
follow contours of Phobos' surface to closely for this to be
tenable); fractures radiating from an impact crater not yet
recognised (perhaps unprotected)and to arrive at Mars by 19
August 1993, and enter a long, elliptical orbit over the poles.
In mid November 1993 it was to begin its two year mapping of the
surface of Mars. Then suddenly, on 22nd August 1993, it was
announced that NASA had lost contact with the spacecraft.

  Americans and the world mourned the loss of a valuable
scientific tool for understanding Mars. Taxpayers wondered if
there was a better way to spend their money than on expensive
space probes that didn't work.

A dark shield was going up on new information about Mars to the
public at large...