Astronomy

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Mars moon Phobos, whose name means "Fear" in ancient Greek, was caught on camera by the NASA Perseverance rover on Feb. 8.

The footage was filmed using the rovers left Mastcam-Z camera, one of two scouting imagers high on the neck-like mast of Perseverance often used to get sweeping landscape views of the Red Planet.

Phobos, first discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877, is an asteroid-sized moon orbiting a few thousand miles (or kilometers) above the Martian surface and continuing to fall towards the planet.

Phobos and the other Mars moon, Deimos, have enigmatic formation histories: Scientists are not sure if they came from the asteroid belt, from collisions, from leftover debris from the early solar system or from some other scenario.

The big task of MMX will be sample return: Picking up dust from the wee moon and then bringing the grains back to Earth.

The program got a big blow last week, however, when JPL laid off many of its MSR employees due to ongoing budgetary woes.

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