From the Vault: Phobos and Deimos, Part 1

to Blow your Mind, the production of My Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're gonna be bringing you an episode about space objects. And as we often do, we're gonna be We're gonna be starting off here by talking a little bit about the mythology that is related to these space objects. Rob, do you

mind if I start with a reading from the Iliad? Oh, let's do it, okay, So I want to read a passage from the Iliad book four, from the excellent translation by Caroline Alexander, And this is describing a big host of warriors raging for battle. It begins, but the Trojans, as the numberless use of a wealthy man, stand in their pen to be milked of their white milk, bleeding incessantly as they hear the cries of their lambs. So the war cries of the Trojans rose through the broad army.

For the speech of all the men was not the same, nor was there one voice, but the tongues were mixed in confusion. The men were summoned from many places. These men. Aries drove on and gleaming eyed Athena drove the Achaeans, and terror and panic and strife raging Insatia, the sister and companion of man, slaughtering Aries. She is small when she first rises up, but in the end she leans her head against the heavens even as she strides upon the earth. Oh, I love that section about the bad

sister there. And she's small when she first rises up, but then when she she gets big, she leans her head against the heavens and got her feet on the earth. So uh. That is referring to one of the companions of Aries, the the god of war. In this passage it is written in this translation as strife the abstract concept. But in the Greek, of course, strife is also the goddess Heiress, and I love that final couplet about her. But there are a couple of other concepts that are

mentioned there that also have personifications. It's not just Heiress, the goddess of strife. There's also terror and panic that are driven on by aries, and these concepts have the

godly personifications of the god's phobos and demos. So phobos and deem ohs are each an abstract concept representing a human state of mind or something you might witness on the battlefield or leading up to it, but they're also these heavenly persons in the Greek mythology, and to read another passage from the Iliad about their their representations, also

from the Caroline Alexandra translation. Then he took up his man, surrounding much emblazoned forceful shield, a thing of beauty, around which ran tin rings of bronze, and on it twenty pale shining discs of tin, and in the very center

was one of dark enameled blue. And crowning this a snake bristling gorgon face stared out with dreadful glare, Terror and Route about her and the shields Baldric was of silver, and on it a blue dark serpent writhed with three heads turned in all directions, growing from a single neck. So here this actually ties back into the episodes that

we re aired pretty recently. I think about the Gorgon Medusa and how uh the the head of the gorgon of of Medusa is widely represented in in Greek art and in Greek literature as a feature of Greek art, mentioned in the literature as this, like this thing that would be on the aegis of Athena or of Zeus, a terrifying image looking out at you, but mentioned alongside the face of the gorgon. Here are Terror and Route. Again, I think these would be Phobos and Demos. Yeah, Phobos

and Demos. So, like you said, this episode we're getting spacey, we're also getting a little mytho mythological here, especially at the start. Phobos and Demos are the names of the two moons of the planet Mars uh and so this this marks return for us uh in in the past. I want to say, it's been a couple of years at least now we did episodes exploring the moons of Jupiter, and then other another episode or episodes exploring the moons

of Saturn. And we always intended to venture onto other moons, and here we are now exploring the moons of Mars, much like the space agencies of Earth. We have long wanted to return a sample from the moons of Mars and and have failed to do so. But you know, maybe the time has finally come. Don't curse this. We might have a technological problem during the recording or retrieval of this episode. Uh So, I'm so excited to be talking about a this gorgeous couple of space turn ups

in orbit around Mars. And uh and so this is going to be the first of a pair of episodes. Be sure to join us for both. Yes, uh and even though it deals with two moons, it's just gonna be. It's very much a part one in part two. It's not like one episode is Phobos in one episode is Demos, as you will see. But before we even get back into Phobos and Demos, I want to start by talking just a bit about our naming of Mars itself. Um So, today we you know, largely refer to the fourth planet

from the sun as Mars. But of course Mars can be seen in the nights sky without the aid of a telescope. So it's gone by many names and has been factored into numerous pantheons and cosmological systems throughout human history. Right, Mars, because it is it can be observed through naked eye astronomy. It was known to the ancient Mesopotamians. Yeah, there was the god nergal Uh, a god of of plague and war, the one that kind of evolved apparently from a war

god into a another world deity. But this was a This was a deity that was recognized by the Sumerians. Likewise, the Greeks knew it as the star of Aries, and we'll of course talk more about areas here in a bit. In Hinduism, Mars was associated with Mangala, a god of war that interestingly seems to encompass aspects of war related to anger and hot headedness, but also to stability and balance. And then the ancient Egyptians connected Mars to Horace, the

celestial falcon and embodiment of kingship. Geraldine Pinch points out in Egyptian mythology that Egypt's earliest kings were depicted as hawks praying on their enemies. So here once once more we can easily connect this to a motif of warfare, um uh, well of one former that or another. Uh. Though interestingly enough, in Chinese traditions, Mars was apparently merely

associated with the element of fire. Oh yeah, because in the Chinese astronomical traditions that different heavenly bodies tend to be associated with like the elements of Earth. Right, so like one planet will be fire, one planet will be

would one planet will be metal or something else? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, So they're important within um, you know, Chinese cosmology and Chinese astrology, though I've also read it argued that the planets have will have maybe less of a significance in Chinese cosmology versus uh, their their place especially in um in in you know, some of these other models that were looking at here where they're closely associated with very

important gods. Coming back to the idea that some of the earliest kings of Egypt were depicted as hawks praying on their enemies, I was just thinking how good it would be if you just made a slight rotation on

that and they were portrayed as vultures vomiting on their enemies. Yeah, well, you know, there's it's not not that huge of a difference, right, and also seems kind of fitting so and and it would be in keeping with with what we've been discussing here, right, because so far we we've been talking about connections to ideas of blood and fire. And of course this inevitably seems to stem from the fact that Mars appears as

a red quote unquote star in the night sky. Even here in Atlanta, where we have terrible light pollution at night, you can often go out and see that that red, gleaming eye of Mars out there in the distance. I think my eyes must be a little bad because I've never personally been able to notice the redness of Mars when I've looked at it with the naked eye, But

I believe other people do see it. Yeah, I mean it's it's it's it's faint, but it's it's noticeable, you know, like you can you can tell that there's something different going on compared to all the other stars in the sky. It stands out. And since it has that red color, you know, it makes sense to associate it with blood and fire and violence and all of these things tied up with it. So the name Mars, of course uh

arises from the Roman tradition. And roughly speaking, you can say that the Roman god of war is Mars, and then the Greek god of war is Aries, and these are basically two names for the same thing. But it's it's really worth driving home that then Mars differs from Aries, and that while Aries was a god of brutality and war in its most base and chaotic state, which I think is is is well represented in in the in the and in in his usage in the Iliad, the

Roman Mars, however, had a different character. He was warfare as just and orderly, you know. He he was warfare that brings um a sense of balance to the world that you know, warfare is viewed by an imperial culture. You know, war is the instrument that demonstrates your greatness. Yeah, Mars is therefore a military deity that maintains order and protects agriculture. Mars is uh Is is very closely associated with agriculture in the Roman tradition. Um, so he upholds

while Aries threatens and tears down Um. And so it's it's interesting because they are like two sides of the same thing, which which I think the Hindu god Mangala seems to encompass both of these aspects. Here we see this divergence in Arias and uh in mars Um. I was I was reading a little bit more. There's a there's a book called Classical Mythology a to z Um. Yeah, that's quite good. And in one of the ways they describe Aries is that he is he's a lord or a god of the screams of the dying. Uh so

you know it's it's not so so. Yeah, mars Is is the god of of war is great, War is good? And then Aries is the war? What is it good for? Uh? Deity? You know, he's just um he he is the worst of the pantheon. Uh he is Aries, the lord of the screams of the dying. Sounds very like a seventies exploitation movie epithet for him, right, you know, he's um

Aries and Aries again. Yeah, and I guess it does come to like, you know, Aries is the very nature and heart of war and violence, where mars is more like, what what use can war be put to? What does it? What does it do? What can it accomplish, uh, you know, very much a whitewashing of war. Now, as with Jupiter that we you know, which we discussed in our recent episode,

Mars has many epithets or aspects um. So instead of having you know, a whole bunch of different deities representing different shades of the same thing, you have different versions of, say Jupiter, and in this case, there are different versions of Mars as well, such as Mars grativ Us, the marching Mars. So this would be the Mars that a soldier in the field would swear by, because you know, as with Jupiter, deities are important for swearing and making

oaths and so forth. Another major Mars is is Mars Pader, protector of agriculture. And this, of course is is literally Mars the Father. And this is also very notable because in Roman myth he is the father. Uh, Mars is the father of Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. So in the Roman tradition, Mars isn't just the god of of noble war. He is also the ancestor of the Roman people. He is the patriarch of the empire exactly. Yeah.

So he yeah, he is the empire. Um. Now this is this is where it gets kind of curious, right, and I imagine a number of people are already thinking about this. So in the Roman tradition, the primary war god Mars has two highly important sons, Romulus and Remus. So wouldn't it make more sense to name the two moons of Mars after Romulus and Remus rather than going to the Greek hopping over to the Greek tradition and drawing on the two uh, two of the sons of Aries.

Wouldn't that imply that one of the moons has to kill the other moon. Um, well, you know, as we'll get into in this episode of the next that's not a crazy idea considering the House of Mars over there. Orbitally speaking, I may be remembering my mythology wrong. I think things go bad for Remus. Well, um, it's worth worth noting. Outside of Star trek Lore, Romulus is the outer moon of the main Belt asteroid eighties seven Sylvia, and Remus is the inner moon. Sylvia is named for

Rea Sylvia, the mythical mother of the founders of Rome. Uh. So it's you know, kind of this was all filled in later. Well, while while we're doing a round up. I should also mention that that passage from the Iliad I read at the top that had that great couplet about airis the goddess of strife. Uh, there is actually an object name for Airess as well. It's the dwarf planet Airis that is not quite a planet, but is a nearly nearly spherical asteroid. Yeah, I guess it's Uh. Basically,

we're just gonna keep finding new things to name. Uh. So if you're if you're out there, any members of the Greek Roman pantheon and you don't have something named after you yet, just hold on, Just be patient, um and mortal beings that you are, We'll get around to you eventually. Wait a second, I feel like I just said something wrong. I think I called Airis an asteroids. Uh, Heiress is not an asteroid. A Airis is a nearly spherical trans Neptunian object. Apologies about that, you pologizing to

the planet or the deity. I don't want to be roped in by strife here. Want to make an enemy of strife, all right? So yeah, obviously instead of naming Mars's two moons after Romulus and Remus, uh, the traditions of drawing on the names of two of the many children of Aries in Greek mythology. So partnered with Aphrodite, he fathered Demos Phobos of course, and we'll get into them in a second, but also Aros or love uh,

Antros requitted love, and Harmonia, who represents harmony uh. And he's also said to have produced other children by other mothers. So there's you know, there's a there's a vast brood. Now I believe Aries Uh. Isn't it the case that Aphrodite was actually married to have faced Us, the forge god, the the equivalent of the Roman vulcan, and that Aries is sort of her lover on the side or are

they officially an item later on? There's a lot of drama there, but it seems are to call a myth about he faced Us making like a net of chains to catch them in the act or something. Yeah, I mean it fits the nature of Arias again, he's he's really the scum of the pantheon here um. But let's talk a bit about the twins. Demos and Phobos, both deities very much in the Greek tradition of war gods.

While Demos is traditionally associated with terror and dread. Phobos is fear and panic, though both of them may be collectively thought of as deities of fear. Uh. They ride beside their father into battle, along with the goddess of discord Heiress so who he mentioned already, But the twin brothers of Fear are referred to in several key works.

We already mentioned the Iliad. They also show up in Hesiods, the Shield of Heracles and um if if memory serves, I think in the Shield of Heracles, they actually like their their father is wounded on the battlefield and they drag him off the battlefield. So they're very much his his pendence, his personal guard, the warriors that go into battle beside him. Um. But they are also just horrifying specters, you know, they are gods of trauma and the psychological

dimensions of war. Um. But they do seem to revolve around their father on the battlefield in a way befitting of moons. So perhaps they're ultimately a better fit, uh than the Roman figures of Romulus and Remus. Yeah, I would say that. I mean, I think one thing that's interesting about them is that they represent two distinct types of fear that are things that you need to manage differently if you're writing horror fiction, say like that Phobos

Phobos is is panic. Phobos is sometimes translated as route, right, like getting routed in battle. You're just like, you know, you're terrified and you're running away, whereas Demos is dread,

the terror that builds in anticipation of of something horrible. Yeah. Yeah, so uh And I also think probably more fitting because Romilis and Remus are a little more they're a little more fleshed out as as figures, whereas Demos and Phobos are a bit more abstract, you know, like we don't have as many tales about them and stories about them

that that uh, you know, that stick with us. They are more you know, harshly formed they are, and then that they themselves are these kind of like fragile, fractured nightmare beings. Um. And I think that's very befitting of the sort of moons that we're going to be talking about, uh in these episodes. Sorry, one thing I just got distracted wondering about. Wait a minute, are are the moons of Mars especially scary as moons? Not in the way that I can think of but they are rather mysterious.

I think they are some of the weirdest, most mysterious objects in the Solar system. You can sort of looking at it sideways, connect that sense of mystery to a kind of creepiness about them. Yeah, I mean, I guess I would. I would say that less frightening as more just like, yeah, mysterious. And also, like you clearly the product of violence, and in the case of one of the moons, like you know, just destined for destruction is

just on a on a collision course with destruction. Um, you know, and uh, I think it pairs well with this idea of like two shattered beings that serve this horrible god they you know, that represents some of the worst aspects of of mortals except in immortal form um. So yeah, I will come back throughout these episodes with comparisons to the mythic twins, the double Grima worm tongues of the Mars system. Yeah, yeah, imagine there's some other good comparisons to make. Yeah, like you know, the sons

of some you know, awful ruler. There might be a good Dune reference in there somewhere. I'm not sure. Oh, I see, like they're the beast Ribon and Uh and fade route the Yeah, though, I don't know. Fate has a lot of things together in ways that these these two don't, so I'm not sure. All right, Well, let's

talk about the discovery of Phobos and Demos. Like we said, Mars has been something that people throughout human history have looked up and seen and attributed various meanings and interpretations too, But not so with Phobos and demos. Uh. These we were not to be discovered for some time. Right. You have to get well into the age of the telescope to be able to see these objects from Earth because they are both very small and very close to Mars.

And when you're looking at Mars in the night sky, it's reflecting a lot of light and it's sort of going to to blast out any small objects nearby it. You're just not going to be able to distinguish them from it. Yeah, So it just simply wasn't possible. Um. They these two moons were discovered though, in eighteen seventy seven by American astronomer ASoft Hall, who lived eight nine through nineteen oh seven. Now, Hall was was large as an interesting character because, for one thing, he was largely

self taught astronomer. He was not a gentleman scientist of the day, but rather the impoverished son of a clockmaker. His father died when he was young, so he had to leave school, uh, in order to be He was going to become an apprentice to a carpenter, but later on he ended up taking math classes at New York Central College, and from there he took a job at the Harvard College Observatory and then became an assistant astronomer at the US Naval Observatory, and eventually he was made

a professor. So he had a really interesting career path, you know, an ascension story. So uh, you know, on one hand, it's it's just neat to see that kind of trajectory with an individual who plays into the history

of astronomy like this. So the way it went down is in eighteen seventy seven, during Mars Closest Approach, his wife, Angeline Stickney, who was a mathematician and a suffragist, encouraged him to engage in the search for the Martian moons, and and to keep engaging in the search because he had in his writings. He apparently loses this saying, well, you know, there's just seemed to be so such a

small chance of him seeing anything. Um, you know, he was considering just giving it up, but his wife encouraged him on, and so he thought he made out Martian moons on August tenth, but he couldn't be sure, you know, it was I think the weather was weird that night, so he didn't have the clarity that he wanted. But then on August twelve he discovered Demos, and on August eighteenth,

he discovered Phobos. Both both of these discoveries were made using equipment at the U. S. Naval Observatory in Washington, d C. Interesting now, since he found them, he got to name them. But as far as I can tell, there's not much more to it than that. I don't you know. I couldn't find anything about him having any real reasoning for choosing these two names over Romulus and Remus. Uh, if he ever considered other names, if he if he named them in an error, I don't know. Um. I

think ultimately they're good names, though, just really scared. That night he'd been reading some ec comics or what would be correct for the time period. He was reading The Great God Pan or whatever. Actually I don't know if that was out of the time. I mean, ultimately, he you know, he could have tried to call them Tweedle dumb and tweedled d So I guess it's just as well that he went with Phobos and Demos. Now, this

is an interesting little side note. I can't find a what felt to me like a really solid source on this, but a profile of his wife, Stickney on the official U. S. Navy page used to state that as she was helping her husband with the calculations and all of this, she asked for a man's wages compensation and he refused so she quit. Um. Oh yeah, I think you know, it's

not like it's really hard to say. I couldn't find any more information about this, so I don't know if this is a joke, uh, if this is you know, totally made up, or you know, if what we're talking about was a serious argument or more of like kind of a fun story that you know that that that spouses tell. I don't know. But at the very least, though Phobos is the largest crater ended up being named for her, Stickney Crater, which we'll get back to in a bit. So, you know, I guess ultimately her work

paid in exposure at least now. Um, others were looking for those moons as well and speculating about their existence. And I ran across a really interesting story about all this that I read on Stephen Novella's neurological blog, And this concerns the moons of Mars and Gulliver's travels. Gulliver's Travels. But Jonathan Swift, Yeah, so that would be long before this discuss This would be over a hundred years before the discovery of the moons, right, Yeah, this goes bad.

This book came out in seventy And have have you ever read Gulliver's travel Yeah, it's been a long time. I read it in college. Um, I took a class in college, so we read a lot of like John Dryden and Alexander Pope and and and Swift and uh, I think we read Gulliver's Travels for that class, or if not, we read large sections of it. It's one that I've never read. I'm just sort of familiar with it bits and pieces that I've absorbed through through other sources. Well,

so Gulliver's Travels, if you've never read it. Here, it's about a it's largely satirical, but it's about a sailor who goes to these weird lands that end up being sort of humorous portraits of things that Swift Swift observed about the world. So they're the lily Putians who are tiny. And then I think at some point he goes to a place called brobb ding Nag, if I remember correctly,

this full of giants. And then he also goes to a place where I don't remember the name of it, but it's the place where the yahoo's are, where the idea of the yah Who's comes from these like a sort of sort of cross apes. Well. At one point in the book, the Lilliputians catch him up on things and inform him that quote. They have likewise discovered two lesser stars or satellites, which revolve around Mars, where all the innermost is distant from the center of the primary

exactly three of his diameters and the outmost five. The former revolves in the space of ten hours and the later in twenty one and a half. Holy cow, that's not that far off. Yeah, and that this is what m Novella writes about in this blog post. He points out quote Phobos and Demos have orbits which are about one point four and three point five diameters from Mars center, respectively.

The Houtians gave figures of three and five. The periods of Phobos and Demos are seven point seven and thirty point three hours, respectively, while while the Laputians reported ten and twenty one point five. These figures are correct to within an order of magnitude, which is another way of saying that they are wrong. They are reasonable guesses, obviously, but do not betray any special knowledge, because basically what he's exploring in this blog post is like the question

what did Swift know? Like why is Swift? Why did Swift get this right? Or sort of right or mostly right, depending on how you're you're skewing it, Rob, I realized I may have led you astray by talking about the lily Putians, because I think there are actually two different things. They're the Lilliputians and the Laputans. And I think this is the Laputans, okay. I think the people of Laputa are on a flying island, whereas the lily Pucians are

somewhere else. They're they're the people who are tiny compared to our apologies to the the Putians and the LiTi Pucians. Um. Yeah, I ended up going When you mentioned Lily Pucians, I ended up going with them because it makes me think of Oliver Sacks talking about the Lily Putians in his book Hallucinations. Oh, I don't recall that having to do with like seeing tiny people. Uh okay, as hallucinations sometimes do to I think I can't remember that tied into

migraines or not. But anyway, fabus book Hallucinations. Well, yeah, this is really interesting. So I guess the question is like, how how close do you have to be in guessing stuff like this to to really be impressive? I don't know. This seems pretty impressive for not actually knowing anything. Well, Novella points out that, first of all, it could just be an educated guess um based for starters on how Mercury and Venus have zero moons, Earth has one, and

then Jupiter and Saturn were known to have many moons. Therefore, perhaps two felt about right, you know, like you needed something between one and many? Uh so why not too? Yeah? Uh? And of course, yeah, you said that it was known that these outer planets had many moons, like we've known that Jupiter had moons since Galileo. Right, But Novella presents

another idea that is pretty interesting. Uh and this this gets kind of this is a really weird concept of because it has to do with uh anagrams and um and so forth. But the idea here is that Swift may have gotten the notion from Johann Kepler, who concluded at one point that Mars had two moons based on a misunderstood cryptic anagram the Galileo devised. What so basically, in Kepler's sixteen ten memoir, he misconstrued this anagram that

Galileo put together. You know all these these uh, these letters that you're supposed to rearrange into their proper form, that he had sent his friends announcing the discovery of Saturn's rings. And instead of getting and I'm not gonna read the the original phrase here, but instead of getting I have observed the highest most distant planet, Saturn to have a triple form, instead he got hail twin companionship, children of Mars, or I agreet you double knob, children

of Mars. I agreet you double knob. Sure that's what he was writing. Yeah, so in anyway, that's that's interesting. Um Novella also points out that Voltaire also wrote about Mars having two moons in the seventeen fifty two book Micromegas. I'm going to read a quote from that quote. But let us now return to our travel ers. Upon leaving Jupiter, they traversed a space of around one hundred million leagues and approached the planet Mars, which as we know, is

five times smaller than our own. They swung by two moons that cater to this planet, but have escaped the notice of our astronomers. I know very well that Father Castel will write, perhaps even agreeably enough, against the existence of these two moons. But I rely on those who reasoned by analogy. These good philosophers know how unlikely it would be for Mars so far from the Sun to have gotten by with less than two moons. Okay, so

I guess this is a work of fiction as well. Yes, yeah, and I think of of similar I've read Voltaire, but not this particular work, but you know, a similar satire and fantasy. Well, good job, Jonathan Swift. Yeah uh yeah, so he basically got it right. But anyway that none of this has anything you know, directly to do with the nature of Demos and Phobos, but it's it's interesting nonetheless. All right, well, maybe we should talk about some of

the physical characterists six of Phobos. All right, Yeah, so yeah, we're gonna mostly start with Phobos, and we'll get into Demos a bit more in the second episode, as well as more stuff about Phobos, because ultimately they are twins

um and they have a lot in common. So if Phobos represents the psyche ravage by war in Uh in Greek mythology, then it might be fitting, you know, given the nature of the moon named after him, because you know, we're talking about a shattered wreck destined to battle its father and perish in the conflict. Now, Phobos is the larger of Mars's two moons. It is seventeen by fourteen by eleven miles or twenty seven by twenty two by eighteen kilometers in diameter, and its shape is is pretty irregular.

It doesn't look like whatever whatever you're imagining. If you haven't seen an image of Phobos, it doesn't look like that. It looks more like a space potato. Yeah, I've seen people say potato. I would say kind of turnip, or if it is a potato. It's not a Russet potato. I think it's more like a Yukon gold. Yeah, it doesn't look very spherical. Um now, it seems to be made of C type rock similar to blackish carbonaceous chondrite asteroids.

And it is, uh, it's absolutely battle scarred. I mean, it's just there are various tracks on it caused by landslides that have occurred, it seems, but it's its surface has just been bombarded into dust by impacts. Uh. And its largest crater again is named for Stickney, and it is um six point two miles or ten kilometers in diameter and seems to have been almost violent enough to have just destroyed it outright. Yeah, if you're trying to picture it in your head, the Stickney crater is so

large that it essentially is one side of this moon. Yeah, it's uh, yeah, it's just it looks really beat up, and it even has these these things that look very much like battle scars, like it's been scratched by an enormous space cat and these were likely caused by uh, you know, various could visions and violence as well. So it's just totally beat up. But like the son of a brutal war. God, it just keeps going on. It's just it keeps clinging to life and uh, and keeps orbiting.

It's uh, it's father. It completes three orbits per day and uh. And it has also has the tightest orbit of any known moon, orbiting at a mere six thousand kilometers or three thousand, seven hundred miles. To put that in comparison, our moon is two hundred and thirty eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty five miles away or three d eighty four thousand, four hundred kilometers away. Yeah, so Phobos is really close to the surface of Mars. Demos is

a good bit farther out, but Phobos. The distance from the surface of Mars to Phobos is actually comparable to distances between recognizable landmarks on the surface of the Earth. Like if there was a road you could drive from Mars to Phobos in a couple of days. Like for comparison, Google Maps tells me that the dry having distance between Miami and Vancouver. So basically, you know, sort of diagonally across North America, I mean, not even all the way

up to Alaska. Uh, that's about thirty four hundred miles or roughly kilometers, so just a little bit shorter than

the distance from Mars to Phobos. Phobos is right in there, right. So, while we've joked about extraterrestrial skies and how large planets sometimes appear in the sky in various movies or works of sci fi art if it's like Battle for Indoor or basically any location in the video game No Man Sky, despite all that, Mars would actually be quite huge in the sky of Phobos if you were standing on its surface.

Oh yeah, I actually looked this up to see if I could find somebody who had done like a scale attempt to create that view, and I could not find it. Maybe it exists somewhere out there, but yeah, it would be absolutely huge because to look at it from the other way, Phobos is, as moons go, extremely tiny. I mean it's again you're looking at like like twenty some thing kilometers in width depending on which side is facing you. Um, so, so this is much much smaller than moons were familiar with,

like Earth's moons or like the Earth's single moon. I didn't mean to suggest the multiple or the larger moons of Jupiter or something like that, but from the surface of Mars, Phobos appears relatively large. I think I remember reading somewhere that it was it looks about a third as big as the Moon usually looks from the surface of Earth, but it's so much smaller. And the reason it looks that big is just how close it is. And here's the an added factor at all this, it's

getting closer. Uh. Phobos edges closer to Mars at a rate of six ft or one point eight meters every century, So in fifty million years it will probably either crash into Mars or break up and become a ring of debris around Mars. I hope it goes the ring route. Personally, yeah, either way, I think I really like the mythic synergy of this because I can easily imagine, you know, this terror using war god Phobos just being destined to fight his own terrible father and perish one way or another

in the attempt. You know, yeah, you're not gonna win, dude, Yeah, but he but he has to, like it's his nature, like this is this is what he's been been, you know, raised and traumatized to do. What else could possibly happen? Now, of course, given the time frame involved here, fifty million years. You know, humans don't have to worry about you know, it's not one of these things we're like, oh, we better not try and land anything on Phobos because it's

it's doomed, won't you know not, you know, not anytime soon. Um. And there have been some proposals that have sought to use Phobos as a kind of staging ground for the exploration of Mars itself, you know, perhaps for robotics for example. Yeah, And there are a lot of we can talk more about this in the second episode in this series, but there are a lot of reasons that Phobos might be really a great place to try to stage space missions.

One reason, for example, is that it would be if you're trying to get something back from Mars or to another place in the Solar System from Mars, it's much easier to get off of Phobos than it is to get off of the surface of Mars itself. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's basically it's like a you know, it's a it's a space station. Um. Now, Phobos has no atmosphere. Um. And also gravity on Phobos, uh is pretty weak. According to NASA quote, Phobos has only one

one thousand as much gravitational pull as Earth. A one fifty pounds or sixty eight kilogram person would weigh two ounces or sixty eight grams there. Um. Yet they do point out that NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has shown evidence of landslides. You know, we mentioned that that earlier of boulders and dust that's fallen back down to the surface after being blasted due to various impacts. So the gravity there is in play, but it is, you know, it is. It is slight compared to the avity of Earth or

certainly other uh moons out there. Right. Phobos is about the mass that if you were to jump on Phobos, you could jump really high, but you would eventually fall back down right now, Like our moon, the twins of Mars are both locked with the same face pointed at their planet. Uh. The day side gets reasonably warm from human perspective. I think I saw it compared in in one NASA document to a a winter day in Chicago, while the night side gets extremely cold. Uh. Though again

there's no atmosphere, so we're talking about surface temperatures here. Uh, you know, there's no air to do anything. They're right the air can't hold the warmth you're just talking about, like being blasted by radiation, and I guess whatever is radiating back up off of the rock beneath your feet. All right, So in discussing Phobos, we should point out as well, and we'll probably get more into this maybe

in the second episode. Is that as of today, as of this recording, no one has actually been to Phobos, certainly not in person, but even attempts to send probes directly to Phobos have failed for various reasons. The Russians made two attempts in the late eighties Phobos one and two. Uh. Those failed seemingly, I think for technical reasons, and then in eleven they attempted to send another one um Phobos grunt to Phobos. That's felled f O b O S g r U n T in uh. The the at

least the English language literature. It was going to collect two grams of soil, but that didn't quite work out. Yeah, it was a proposed sample return mission. Would have been really cool if we could have gotten some of Phobos back here to Earth to study. But it failed. I think it actually was it failed in orbit before it began its journey to Mars and just ended up stuck in Earth orbit without the ability to travel. Now, various other missions have been proposed and are being considered ard

but nothing is launched as of this recording. UM. But missions to Mars have and will continue to capture images of the moons. Uh, you know if for starters, like once again, it's it's fairly visible in the sky if you catch it at the right time. So that has been one of the ways that we've captured images of it.

Also the fly bys. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention about Phobos Grunt was actually, uh, it was a Russian mission, but it was also a joint venture with the Chinese Space Program and so the Chinese had part

part of the mission as well. And then also part of what they were going to do was they were going to they had some micro organisms aboard and they were going to study how the round trip from the from Earth to the moons of Mars and then back to Earth affected these micro organisms that were on the payload. I think the Planetary Society had a had a small

uh experiment that was aboard as well. Yeah, yeah, was that the was that the micro organisms that may have been actually yes, yeah, but a any rate it did not come to pass. Uh, So we did not get to bring anything back from the surface of Phobos. We didn't get to have any thing directly investigate the surface of Phobos, which is a shame, because there there's some

interesting features there to say the least. Oh. Yeah, So, if we were to begin a curiosity tour of the surface of Phobos, I think one of the top things to look at would be the Phobos Monolith. Monolith. You say monolith, I say, so, there is a giant rock on the surface of Phobos against the relatively smooth, cratered background. And I mean smooth, not because not because it's like a featureless surface. There are many craters, but it's not very craggy, if that makes any sense. It is, uh.

It is kind of dust covered and dimpled but not not not sharp angles. And against this relatively smooth background, there is this rock that stands out like a white tower in the great dust, and it shines really bright in the sun and it casts this long looming tail of shade across the ground behind it. And judging by the length of its shadow, some astronomers have estimated that this rock is about ninety meters tall or about three hundred feet, and for this reason, some media outlets describe

it as building sized. I guess that's reasonable. If it's like three d feet tall, it's like a small office building. But you're you're you're also bringing to mind certain ideas about what it might be when you say it's building sized. Yes, and that's like if I were to say it was it's giant robot sized. Yeah. Uh So this rock has come to be known as the Phobos monolith, and it is one of the geologic features of our solar system that is genuinely exquisitely interesting, but you know, like so

many others, in many cases appreciated for all the wrong reasons. Uh. The the it's aliens crowd loves this rock, now, why would that be. Well, a major point of departure here seems to be originally a c SPAN clip, which is not where you might expect, you know, sort of conspiracy minded ideas to originate from c SPAN. You generally pretty uh, pretty dry and pretty by the numbers. Yeah, I oh, I like c Span And actually I would say there's

nothing wrong with this clip. It's just people misinterpreting a clip or selectively quoting from a clip. So this originally I think aired in July of two thousand nine, that's at least when the version I found was uploaded. But in this clip, the revered American astronaut Buzz Aldren, who of course, along with Neil Armstrong, was one of the first two human beings to walk on the Moon, that was during the Apollo eleven landing in nineteen sixty nine.

He is being interviewed on the c SPAN program Washington Journal, and I believe this was in the context of originally talking about human colonization of Earth's Moon, but Aldren starts talking about the general impetus for exploration of looking at things that people find curious or inspiring about the about the Solar system at large, and using that sort of like public rapture about strange and interesting features of the Solar system to to motivate scientific exploration of them, as

opposed to just say returning to the Moon exclusively. And Aldrin says, quote, we should go boldly where man has not gone before. Fly by the comets, visit asteroids, visit the moon of Mars. There's a monolith. They're a very unusual structure on this little potato shaped object that goes around Mars once in seven hours. When people find out about that, they're gonna say, who put that there? Who

put that there? Now, it seems like when the alien websites clipped this out, they stopped the quote right there and then they, you know, slap a headline on it, like buzz alder and let's slip the alien conspiracy. Of course, the next thing Aldren says is, well, the universe put it there, or if you choose, God put it there, and then he moves on to other topics. You can look this clip up yourself. So obviously Aldern is not

alleging that this monolith is of artificial origin. He's not only not alleging that he's explicitly saying the exact opposite, it is of natural origin. But of course that's not going to stop the usual suspects from using this clip as evidence of the alien cover up conspiracy. Uh And so, of course, the the Internet's favorite hoax hype man and general disinformation source Alex Jones, has it several times tried to suggest that buzz Aldren might be saying he believes

it was made by aliens like uh. During a two thousand nine interview, and that might actually be the weirdest thing here is that Alex Jones actually did do an interview with Buzz Aldren in two thousand nine. I guess at the time nobody really knew who Alex Jones was.

But during this interview, Jones tried to suggest that buzz Aldren might believe that this monolith was made by aliens, and in a more recent clip I found Jones is saying that Aldren actually told him in that two thousand nine interview that the Phobos monolith was quote sending a transmission and quote it's all Egypt. There's aliens and everything else. It's all Egypt. Yeah, it's all Egypt. There's aliens and everything else. And I saw that, I was like, what

what could he even be referring to? Like, I didn't believe that Aldren had actually said that, but I wonder, like, what's he basing this claim on. So I said, what the heck, I'll actually look it up and the result was hilarious. So again, the weirdest thing about this to me is that at some point Alex Jones actually did interview the second person to walk on the Moon. Um, but so in the interview, he does ask Aldrin about this, and Aldrin says the exact opposite of what Jones claims.

So Jones asks him, while if I'm not mistaken, I think showing him a picture of the wrong object. I think he's showing him a picture of an object from the surface of Mars. But he says, what does this look like to you? And Aldrin respond on he says, it's a big, big, tall rock. Now I can say, maybe it looks like a crude construction device by some creatures who practiced on Phobos and then landed in Egypt

and built the Pyramids. And then he starts laughing and says, I don't really believe that, but some people are liable to think that. So Aldrin is making fun of and then explicitly rejecting the claim that Jones attributes to him. Not only did he not say what Jones claims, he says literally exactly the opposite. This is interesting. Yeah, it's

a real real cherry picking of you know picking. Yeah. Yeah, Like like he's saying, I'm not saying it's aliens at all, it's actually this, but he's but then it's like he said the word aliens in the sentence, so he's basically saying it's aliens. Well, the claim that Jones is referring to their is Aldrin making fun of people like Alex Jones.

He's saying, like, you know, I could say that the this was aliens practicing building the pyramids, and you know, you have to admit like that idea, even though it raises additional questions, is a fantastic idea, and you should see why people would be drawn to it and wanted to be true. I mean, what does it mean? What what would it mean for ancient Egypt? What would it mean for life in our solar system? It brings so many sort of vague, half form but promising science fiction

ideas to mind. I have so many funny questions about So here's one random thought. If there were actually a conspiracy to cover up the existence of an alien office building or a practice pyramid on the surface of Phobos, why would buzz Aldren know about it? Like, do you all retired astronauts just get a regular digest of the alien cover up? You know, like they get a dossier every week. It's like, here's all the alien evidence we've covered up in the past quarter well, I was thinking

about this a little bit. On one hand, Yeah, this kind of the loose idea that well, they were they were part of the space exploration and system, you know, so perhaps they have privileged information or they've been to space, so maybe they know about space, but you know, in

secret ways. But then I also was thinking, well, maybe this goes back, Maybe this is deeper, like maybe this connects to a lot of our mythological ideas about people who are you know, taken up that ascend into heaven you know, so here is, or or have descended into the underworld. So here is a case where someone has literally traveled to what you could easily classify as another world. They have traveled beyond our world to another and returned.

And you know, it's it's amazing, don't get me wrong. Uh, you know, the the lunar missions were incredible technological achievements and and achievements of just a human courage and ingenuity. Um,

but they were not other worldly journeys. But I wonder if the two you know, become uh you know, wound together in the sort of the collective imagination, like you know, I had to I had within the you know, the time or two that we've been around astronauts or spoken to an astronaut, it has entered my mind like this

person has left the earth. You know. It's like in in a not in a you know, I you know, I know that I'm I'm talking to an accomplished human being when we're doing this, But there's there's a part of me that is like, this person's maybe not completely human anymore, like they're not completely of earth because they have left Earth, you know, you know, in an you know, like unformed way, This bipedal primate like me has been

touched by the gods. Now, yeah, so I wonder if you know, to to some extent we were sort of hardwired to make those connections due to our our myths and our you know, our religious um stories, etcetera. Oh yeah, I mean I can see that tendency. I mean again, I think with this kind of thing, the logic is very loose. And on one hand, I mean, I would say with somebody like Alex Jones, I mean, he just this is just a person with a propensity to spread lies.

But I would say as for the the broader, uh tenacity of this misunderstanding about this object, on the surface of Phobos. I think maybe part of the misunderstanding might just come from the word monolith. This would tie back to back into the idea you brought up when I was first introducing the subject about calling it building sized, which I mean, I guess it is also calling it a monolith. I mean, this object does appear to be a monolith. That is a literally accurate description. It's a

single piece of rock. But unfortunately, by its association with two thousand one of Space Odyssey, that word now has some baggage, you know, of of associations with artificial origin. Of course, there are tons of natural monoliths on Earth.

The world is full of them. But when you say monolith, I think, especially in anybody who's who's ever seen a science fiction film or anything that has any derivative of science fiction, has has a certainly a way of two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, and so you think of the monolith. Right. So if that's causing confusion for you, you could just say the huge rock on Phobos. Uh. But anyway, whether or not you would expect a retired astronaut to have any special insight on this subject, it

is absolutely false that Aldrin claimed that Phobos. The Phobos monolith was of artificial origin, he said, the exact opposite. So that leads to the question what is its real origin? And I found a good article on the BBC from s by Colin Barriss that tried to look into this question. Okay, so, given that there's this huge, weird looking boulder jutting up out of the surface of Phobos, where did it come from? Well, again, according to our best images, the monolith does appear to

be some kind of giant boulder. It's about ninety ms or roughly three hundred feet tall, as I said, and it's on a surface region of Phobos that is otherwise uh, free of large craggy features like this. I was trying to communicate exactly what I meant when I smooth isn't quite the right word, because it has all these craters and dimples in it. But the craters and everything look relatively I don't know, rounded, as as the surfaces of dusty objects in space often do. And this thing looks

I guess you would say. The angles appear uncharacteristically sharp. So imagine a you know, office building sized boulder in the middle of a field in Kansas that otherwise has some kind of big soft craters in it. Now, the Phobos monolith has not really been the subject of much high profile scientific study, but it seems consistent with surface features that are produced by normal natural processes on the

surface of moons and planets. So this could be a giant boulder that fell off of, say the edge of a crater in a in a rock slide or something like that. And furthermore, there is pretty clear evidence that whatever Phobos itself is, it has at various points in the past experienced asteroid impacts, so the monolith could also be a giant shard of rock that was ejected from

some past impact. But then Barris draws attention to another really interesting option, which is that the Phobos monolith could also possibly be a chunk of Mars itself, and as as evidence of this, he points to the precedent of a study by Kenneth R. Ramsley and James W. Head, the third published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in two thousand thirteen called Mars Impact Ejecta in the

Regular of Phobos Bulk Concentration and Distribution. Basically, the idea is that the surface of Phobos is blanketed in little bits of Mars, and I think mostly these would just be very small particles, but they could include larger particles. And the authors estimate based on some calculations that the bulk concentration of Mars ejective fragments in the upper Phobos regulars is about two hundred and fifty parts per millions.

So if you're looking at the stuff on the surface of Phobos, about two hundred and fifty parts per million of that stuff is actually stuff that's from the planet Mars. And this again would come from uh from impacts. Like the majority of it is going to be smaller particles, but when objects strike the surface of Mars with high energy, bits of Mars sometimes get blasted into orbit, and some of those bits are going to end up settling on the surface of Phobos. And of course this brings us

back again to what we were talking about earlier. Remember that Phobos orbits very close to the surface of Mars compared to most moons, so you can imagine that it's easier for parts of Mars to end up on the surface of Phobos than it would be for parts of the surface of a planet to end up on a moon. That's orbiting much farther away. But Barris mentions another possibility, writing quote Alternatively, the Phobos monolith might not have formed

during an impact. It could be a rare chunk of the moon solid bedrock, poking up through a surface that is otherwise mostly strewn with loose debris. So imagine that kind of a Devil's tower of Phobos, like poking up out of where everything else around it has is covered with enough dust to look pretty smooth. And Barriss writes that if this is true, if it's you know, some some feature of the underlying rock of Phobos, if it's

a devil's tower kind of thing. Uh. If this is true, studying the monolith could actually help us solve some of the mysteries about the origin of Phobos, like where did these strange moons come from in the first place, which I guess maybe we'll come back to at the beginning of part two of this series. But just a couple of other notes about the Phobos monolith. One is that it looks really cool and you should look it up,

but source your images carefully. I was coming across a lot of photos on the web that seem to be labeled as if they are the Phobos Monolith, but I'm pretty sure they're not. Some of them just look like they're from a movie or something, and I think others are pictures of things that are actually on the surface of Mars itself. But then one other thing I found out was that Les Claypool and Sean O. O. Lennon have an album that is named after the Phobos Monolith.

Rob I sent you a link. Did you have a chance to listen or not? I have not had a chance to listen to it yet. I haven't heard any of Claypool stuff with with Oh, no, I've I'm of course, I'm familiar with Primus and NF Scene, Primus Live. And I'm I'm familiar with his work with uh with with Trey Anastasio in Oyster Head. Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, have some some good stuff there too, But no, I haven't. I haven't heard Phobos Monolith. Well. I only got to

listen to a little bit. But it is very weird, but with less of the cheese related humor that you associate with older less Claypool works. It seems a little a little more sober perhaps, uh and actually a little a little more sober and has some relatively scientifically accurate lyrics.

I can't vouch for the whole thing, but the part I was listening to was talking about the Phobos monolith and buzz Aldrin, and I think everything that it said about the everything I recall it saying about the monolith and the moon was scientifically correct. Quote the monolith of Phobos, it stares buzz in the eye. It bids him question while we live and do or die? Okay, checks out. Wait, wait, that's not the part I was thinking. Maybe that went

by me. I remember him talking about He had some part about the moon being sort of tat or shaped, which seems reasonable, even though we maybe turnip is better. I think he also mentioned that its orbit is decaying over time, so it's moving closer to Mars, which is true. Yeah. Yeah, Well the next two lines are the monolith of Phobos, it stares buzz in the eye on a tat shaped moon that's falling from the sky. Okay, so that's that's that's more accurate. Yeah, And and then there's also some

part about it like it. It doesn't say it's aliens, It just says that like the monolith raises a bunch of questions, which is true. It does raise questions. It some genuine and scientific uh, others not so much. Um, but but yeah, still, I mean it's it is something like the monolith of Phobos as real. As we've said, Uh, you just need to be be careful about what image you're you're pulling up of it and uh and what

interpretation you're reading regarding it. Now. As we've mentioned already, one of the biggest mysteries about Phobos and demos is where these moons come from in the first place? What is their origin? Because they have a number of features that seem to be, at least on the surface level, contradictory and point off in different directions when you're looking for an origin story. And I think maybe that's where we should start when we come back in part two.

Where do these moons come from? And how were they made? Yeah? So, so join us. Will also be some some at least from today's standpoint, kind of out there sounding hypotheses about about what what what these moons are. Uh, so it'll be it'll be fun. So join us in our next episode of Stuff to Blow your mind as we continue our exploration of Phobos and demos the Moons of Mars. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you know

where to find them. Core episodes come out Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed Monday's we do a bit of listener mail. Wednesdays that's when we do the artifact. On Friday's we do a little weird house cinema where we we set most of the science aside and just talk about a weird movie. And on the weekend we do a little bit of uh, a little vault episode. We do a little rerun for you.

So that's what six days out of seven, and on the seventh day we rest or, we run an ad sometimes, you know, we get ready for the first day again. Yes, all right, huge, thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future, we're just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to

Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.