Speaker 1: Welcome to the deep Dive, the place where we take
the most tantalizing mysteries and science, history and space, and
we get straight to the facts beneath the folklore. And
today we are going way out there. We are we're
soaring way beyond the Red planet, landing on its well.
It's terrifying, doomed and incredibly strange moon photos.
Speaker 2: And we are wrestling with a question that has captivated
everyone from astrophysicists to late night Internet theorists. Did someone
put that giant structure there?
Speaker 1: That's the hook that gets everyone, isn't it. You have
these three elements that just sound like pure science fiction,
but they all absolutely real. Right. First, you have this gigantic,
strangely rectangular structure, a monolith, just sitting there on an
alien moon.
Speaker 2: Then you have an icon an Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin,
basically posing the ultimate question about its origin.
Speaker 1: And third, the really chilling part is the story of
the Soviet probe Phobos two, which just vanished. It went
silent right after snapping a final really anomalous image that
some people claim shows that hostile entity took it out.
Speaker 2: So our mission today is to cut through all of
that noise. I mean, the Internet is just a wash
with these sensationalist posts and theories that weave all three
of these things into one grand narrative of alien architects
and interstellar conflict, right, a cover up exactly. So we're
here to look at the primary source material, the planetary geology,
the engineering forensics from the probe, and the actual context
of that buzz Aldrin quote and really separate the objective
facts from the let's call it the narrative fiction.
Speaker 1: And the question is just so irresistible because it comes
from such a legitimate place. Buzz Aldrin in that famous
two thousand and nine c Span appearance, was talking about
the monolith when he asked, and this is the quote
that launched one thousand YouTube videos. When people find out
about that, they're going to say, who put that there?
Who put that there?
Speaker 2: And that just grabs you, and it instantly captures the
public's imagination.
Speaker 1: It absolutely does. But to understand why this object looks
so alien and why any mission failure there just seems
so dramatic, we have to start by grounding ourselves in
the reality of Phobos itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this isn't just any moon. It's arguably the most
structurally compromised and dynamically volatile natural satellite in the entire
Solar System. It's a weird, weird place.
Speaker 1: And the name is so appropriate. Phobos, along with its
little companion Demos, they're the Greek personifications of fear and panic.
Speaker 2: And for a good reason. They were discovered by the
astronomer Assop Hall back in eighteen seventy seven, and he
almost gave up the search. I mean, they're so tiny
and so close to the glare of Mars, they're incredibly
hard to.
Speaker 1: Spot, and that tiny size is deceptive. Phobos is so
irregularly shaped people call it a little potato shaped object,
which is pretty accurate.
Speaker 2: It measures only about twenty seven kilometers across at its
whitest point, and then it shrinks down to maybe eighteen
kilometers at its narrowest. It's really truly diminutive.
Speaker 1: But that tiny size is coupled with a truly insane orbit.
It's the closest moon to its parent planet of any
that we know of in the Solar System, that's right.
Speaker 2: And it whips around Mars faster than Mars even rotates
on its own axis.
Speaker 1: That's mind bending.
Speaker 2: It completes an entire orbit in just seven hours and
thirty nine minutes. Now, think about what that means. If
you were standing on the surface of Mars, Phobos would
appear to rise in the west, west, the west, and
then it was set in the east, and it does
this twice every single Martian day. It would be this bizarre,
fast moving object in the sky.
Speaker 1: It's a total orbital roller coaster, which creates these extreme
tidal forces. And that brings us to the crucial piece
of information, the thing that really sets the stage for
its structure and its imminent demise. Phobos is in a.
Speaker 2: Death spiral precisely. This is all down to orbital mechanics,
something called tidal decceleration. The gravitational pug of war between
Phobos and Mars is constantly stealing energy from Phebos's orbit,
so it's getting closer. It's getting closer, and this gradually
shrinks its orbital radius. The rate of descent is relentless.
It's falling toward Mars by about two meters. That's roughly
six and a half feet every hundred years.
Speaker 1: Two meters every century doesn't sound like much, but when
you're talking geological time scales, that's a catastrophic spiral.
Speaker 2: It is, and the consequence is totally inevitable. Planetary scientists
estimate that the relentless pull of Martian gravity is going
to tear Phobos apart in about thirty to fifty million years.
Speaker 1: Which in cosmic terms is tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It's nothing, and the fragments won't just vanish. They're going
to form a temporary but probably spectacular planetary ring system
around Mars.
Speaker 1: So we are talking about a moon that is under constant,
extreme stress. It's already suffering from an existential crisis. This
impending destruction and the tidal stress it's under right now
has to be central to understanding its weird interior structure
and all those strange features on its surface.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's the key to everything.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack the actual makeup of this moon, because
the geology tells a story that really really pushes back
against the idea that it's some solid, artificial structure. The
data suggests it's way more fragile than that.
Speaker 2: It's pretty much the opposite of solid. The first clue
you get to its weird structure is just its appearance.
Phobos is one of the least reflective bodies in the
Solar System. It has an extremely low albedo of about
point zero seven to.
Speaker 1: One, so it's dark like charcoal dark exactly.
Speaker 2: It makes it look like these blackish carbonaceous C type
asteroids which are really rich in organic compounds and other
volable materials.
Speaker 1: And that dark, primitive look is what led to the
first big scientific hypothesis, right, that Phobos was just a
captured asteroid that wandered too close to Mars and got
snagged by its gravity.
Speaker 2: That was hypothesis one, and it seemed logical, you know,
based on the composition. But then as we got more
data from missions like Viking and later Mars Express, we
were able to calculate its mean density, and that's the
key metric.
Speaker 1: What was the number.
Speaker 2: The density came out to be around one point eight
eight seven grams per cubic centimetor.
Speaker 1: And why is that number a huge problem for the
captured asteroid.
Speaker 2: Theory because if Phobos were a solid chunk of that
dark C type asteroid rock, you expect a density much
closer to three grams per cubiccentimator.
Speaker 1: Oh, so it's way too light.
Speaker 2: Way too late. The reality is Phobos is unusually fluffy
for lack of a better word. This low density points
to one shocking conclusion, significant internal porosity.
Speaker 1: So if I'm understanding this, you take the mass of Phobos,
you divide it by its volume, and the numbers only
work out if a huge percentage of the inside is
just empty space.
Speaker 2: Precisely, the porosity is estimated to be thirty percent, give
or take five percent, thirty percent of it is just
void's empty space. Wow. This strongly supports the idea that
Phobos isn't a single solid object. It's a loosely aggregated
body what planetary geologists call a rubble pile. A rubble pile, Yeah,
it's held together by its own very very weak gravity
and maybe a thin, brittle outer crust. It's like a
giant cosmic gravel bag. And this extreme fragility is vital
when you start thinking about out how a massive boulder
like the monolith could even stand upon its surface.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the high perosity, the rubble pile conclusion, that
makes the captured asteroid theory a lot less likely.
Speaker 2: It does it forced the scientists to lean much more
heavily toward hypothesis too.
Speaker 1: Martian ejecta right, tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Well, if it were a captured asteroid, its orbit would
probably be more inclined, more elliptical. Instead, Phobos and Demos
have these extremely circular orbits that lie almost exactly over
Mars's equator.
Speaker 1: Which is not what you'd expect from something just randomly captured,
not at all.
Speaker 2: The low density, the high porosity, and that very specific
equatorial orbit. They all strongly suggest that Phobos formed after Mars.
It likely coalesced from a ring of material Martian ejecta
that was blasted into orbit by a giant impact on
Mars itself long ago.
Speaker 1: So Phobos could actually be made of bits of Mars's
ancient crust and mantle, all just clumped.
Speaker 2: Back together essentially. Yes, it's the same mechanism we believe
formed our own moon, just on a much smaller and
much more structural unsound scale.
Speaker 1: And the mystery keeps going because we are still trying
to figure out what's inside this rubble pile. I want
to talk about the new data from the European Space
Agency's Mars Express mission.
Speaker 2: Yes, this is where the deep dies gets really technical
and cool. Mars Express has an instrument called Marsus that's
the mars Advanced radar for subsurface and ionosphere sounding.
Speaker 1: A ground penetrating radar for a moon basically.
Speaker 2: Now, radar is notoriously difficult to use on small, fast moving,
non spherical bodies. It's a nightmare. But Issa recently updated
Marcus's software to let it function much closer to Phobos.
Speaker 1: Sow does radar tell us what's inside? It's just bouncing signals.
Speaker 2: Right, it is, But marsis sends very low frequency radio
waves down into the moon. The moon or solid rock,
the waves would penetrate and reflect cleanly from different layers
or a denser core, But on a rubble pile on Phobos.
They're looking at how the signals scatter and attenuate, how
they fade. The speed and intensity of the reflections are
directly related to the density distribution of the material inside.
Speaker 1: And what did the radar hints review?
Speaker 2: They found hints of unknown structures below the regolith. Now,
let's be very clear, this is not a map of
hallways and support.
Speaker 1: Beams, right, not alien construction.
Speaker 2: No, it's likely detecting voids or internal density variations, pockets
where the rubble is more loosely packed, or maybe even
a slightly more cohesive, water rich inner core. It just
reaffirms that the internal structure is a total mess. It's heterogeneous,
and it keeps the origin debate captured or coalesced very
much alive.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's move to the surface, because this internal
frigility is what created the monolith's origin story in the
first place. Phobos is completely dominated by one gigantic scar,
Stickney Crater.
Speaker 2: Stickney Crater is a terrifying feature. It's nine point seven
kilometers wide. Now, given the Moon's overall tiny dimensions, the
impact that created it was so violent that dynamic models
show it must have come within a hair's breadth of
completely shattering the entire Moon.
Speaker 1: Like the death star on Mimus.
Speaker 2: Exactly like that. It's what scientists call a stressed body.
It's been through trauma.
Speaker 1: And radiating out from Stickney are those bizarre, extensive networks
of grooves and streaks. Some of them are up to
twenty kilometers long. They almost look artificial.
Speaker 2: They look incredibly unnatural, like uniform tire tracks or something.
For decades, those grooves also fueled the idea of artificial engineering.
The early theories were that they were deep fissures, stress fractures,
from the Stickney impact propagating through the whole rubble pile.
Speaker 1: But we have better explanations now, right we do.
Speaker 2: Modern computational modeling has given us two much more robust
and less dramatic explanations.
Speaker 1: What's the leading theory for those parallel grooves now?
Speaker 2: The current favorite, which is strongly supported by a twenty
eighteen computational analysis, links the grooves directly to secondary ejecta. Basically,
the impact that created Stickney was so massive it launched
giant chunks of rock, huge boulders, out into microgravity orbit.
These chunks then fell back down out.
Speaker 1: Of the surface, so the grooves are not fractures, they're literally.
Speaker 2: Scratch marks exactly. When these massive boulders launched from Stickney
land back on the surface of a rubble pile in microgravity,
they don't just stop. They don't crater. They skip and
they roll and they bounce across the surface in a
predictable pattern, following the path of least resistance.
Speaker 1: So they're carving out these long parallel tracks they are.
Speaker 2: This movement creates the long, parallel, predictable groove patterns we see.
It's a much more elegant explanation.
Speaker 1: It means the grooves are basically a fossil record of
the biggest, most violent event in Phobos's history.
Speaker 2: And that leads us directly to the monolith, because the
monolith is simply the largest, most spectacular piece of that
ejective that didn't roll. It just landed and stuck.
Speaker 1: Okay, now we're at the Star attraction the Phobos monolith itself,
and let's be crystal clear for everyone listening. This is
a real catalog structure. It is not an optical illusion.
It is not a conspiracy theory fan.
Speaker 2: It is absolutely real. It's a recognized feature on the
surface of Phobos. It was first observed in imagery captured
by the Mars Global Surveyor or MGS, using its high
res camera way back in nineteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Eight, and an imaging contractor named Lan Fleming later confirmed it.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, he confirmed it after a public survey
of the data first pointed it out.
Speaker 1: So it's been known for a long time, and the
scale is just difficult to wrap your head around. When
you hear monolith, you think of something smaller, but this
is described as building sized. Give us the exact dimensions based.
Speaker 2: On geometric analysis of its shadow, which is how you
determine height on airless bodies. The structure is estimated to
be approximately eighty five meters across and standing roughly ninety
meters tall.
Speaker 1: Ninety meters tall.
Speaker 2: It's monumental. If you stood it on Earth, it would
be taller than the Statue of Liberty, not counting her pedestal.
Speaker 1: And its location is the second piece of this whole
geological puzzle.
Speaker 2: It sits prominently near the rim of that colossal Stickney crater,
and this proximity is the single most compelling piece of evidence. Again,
it's an artificial origin. Planetary geologists are confident the monolith
is a piece of dense, coherent core fragment that was
violently ejected from the Stickney impact and just happen to
land exactly where it sits now.
Speaker 1: But the human fascination, the reason we call it a
monolith is because it looks so rectangular, almost purposefully shaped.
How does a violent injection create something that looks so structured.
Speaker 2: You're hitting on two really critical points there, geometry and physics. First,
the rectangularity is often exaggerated. It's due to low image
resolution and.
Speaker 1: Our brains trying to make sense of it exactly.
Speaker 2: Our human tendency toward peridolia. Seeing familiar shapes like faces
or in this case, geometric structures does all the rest.
We fill in the blur with something familiar, like the
monolith from two thousand and one A Space Odyssey.
Speaker 1: And what about the physics? How can a ninety meter
rock stand upright after being blasted out of a crater
without shattering?
Speaker 2: That's the second point, and it's unique to these tiny
micro gravity environments like Phobos. If exactly a large internally
coherent block of rock, maybe a denser chunk from the
Moon's original core, can be ejected and just land at
an odd upright angle. Because the Moon's gravity is so weak,
there's not enough force to make it topple over or
sink or shatter. It just rests vertically on one of
its fractured.
Speaker 1: Faces, giving it that standing stone look.
Speaker 2: That's it. NASA officially classifies it as a prominent boulder
in its photojournal.
Speaker 1: So Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut, he saw this amazing natural
geological curiosity, and he seized on the public's interpretation of
it to make a point. Let's address that misquote directly,
because this is where the popular narrative gets it completely
and totally wrong.
Speaker 2: This is a classic classic case of selective editing. Aldron
was not confessing to an alien artifact. He was campaigning
for a human mission to Phobos. This was all during
his promotion of the Prime Mission concept, which imagined using
Phobos as a staging area for future Mars landing.
Speaker 1: So tell us about the full crucial context of this
two thousand and nine C Span appearance.
Speaker 2: His goal was to generate enthusiasm for bold exploration. He
started by saying, we should go boldly where man is
not gone before, fly to comets, visit asteroids, visit the
moon of Mars. And then he uses the monolith as
the ultimate piece of PR.
Speaker 1: And this is the part that all the conspiracy videos
play in a loop. There's a monolith there, 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 going to say, who put that there?
Who put that there?
Speaker 2: That's the rhetorical device. It's de bait. He intentionally raises
the mystery to grab the listener's attention, which is just
smart political maneuvering for a PR mission But the.
Speaker 1: Very next thing he says, which is almost always cut
from the online clips, is the answer.
Speaker 2: It is the very next breath he says, Well, the
universe put it there. If you choose God put.
Speaker 1: It there, that's a complete narrative reversal.
Speaker 2: It is. He didn't endorse the alien architecture theory at all.
He was using the sensationalism of a nap virtual curiosity
to advocate for his scientific human mission to go investigate it.
Speaker 1: Because amission to Phobos is seen as much easier, a
better stepping stone than landing directly on Mars itself.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, the monolith is sensational, but his actual conclusion confirms
he views it as a geological feature. The media sensationalism
just chose to clip the inconvenient scientific conclusion off the
end of the sound bite, letting the question hang there
all tantalizingly in the air.
Speaker 1: The truth is just less dramatic, but way more interesting.
It's a natural building sized piece of a moon that
is literally falling apart.
Speaker 2: A powerful lesson in how a narrative can survive just
by truncation.
Speaker 1: Well, speaking of things that captured the imagination and then
ended abruptly, let's pivot to the second great Phobos mystery,
this one rooted in Cold War technology, the Phobos two incident.
Speaker 2: So this takes us from the geology of a Rubbel
pile to the unforgiving reality of deep space engineering in
the nineteen eighties. The sudden, unresolved loss of the Soviet
probe Phobos two in March nineteen eighty nine is what
fueled the most dramatic and enduring conspiracy narratives about this moon, and.
Speaker 1: The whole program was already reeling at that point. The
mission had a twin probe, Phobos one, that failed even earlier.
Speaker 2: Didn't it it did? Phobos IE failed spectacularly in September
nineteen eighty eight, just two months after it launched, due
entirely to human error. A technician sent a series of
commands to the probe, and one critical command, a simple
typo a single wrong character, deactivated the attitude control thrusters.
Speaker 1: Oh no, yeah.
Speaker 2: Because the thrusters were off, the probe started to tumble,
it lost its lock on the Sun, the solar panels
couldn't get power, and it was dead before it ever
even reached Mars. A catastrophic failure from a single keystroke
so that sets.
Speaker 1: The stage for Phobos two carrying the entire weight of
the Soviet space program on its shoulders, and his goal
was incredibly ambitious, especially for nineteen eighty nine technology.
Speaker 2: The plan was audacious. Phobos two was supposed to approach
within just fifty meters of the Moon's surface fifty fifty
meters and then released two small landers, a mobile hopper
and a stationary platform to study the surface composition in
internal structure up close.
Speaker 1: But on March twenty seventh, nineteen eighty nine, just before
it was supposed to make that final approach maneuver, communication
was lost abruptly, and that's when the sensational claim.
Speaker 2: To cold Right. The narrative became that the probe went
silent right after transmitting an image that allegedly showed a
large cylindrical object or a giant shadow, implying some external
hostile entity disabled it.
Speaker 1: That story became gospel in certain circles for decades.
Speaker 2: It did, But after the Cold War, technical reports were
finally made public and they provide this detailed, almost painful
forensic accounting of the internal engineering failures. The WHOLSAGI is
one of process or errors and just fundamentally inadequate software architecture,
not alien intervention.
Speaker 1: Let's break down the technical causes, because this is where
a deep dive into the engineering really pays off. What
was the actual state of the space creft when it
got to Mars?
Speaker 2: It was deeply compromised from the start. The Phobos two
probe arrived at Mars with significant systemic issues, and crucially,
two of its three primary onboard computers were already malfunctioning.
Two out of three YEP one was completely dead and
the second one was intermittent at best. The spacecraft was
already operating on a nice edge.
Speaker 1: Why is two out of three failing so disastrous? Why
couldn't the one healthy computer just take over the mission?
Speaker 2: Because the spacecraft used a specific design called a voting architecture.
This is a system that's actually meant to prevent a
single faulty component from messing up the mission. It requires
at least two of the three computers to agree on
a decision. They literally vote, in order to control the
craft's critical functions like attitude adjustments or course corrections.
Speaker 1: Ah So, with two computers already on the fritz, the
voting architecture actually worked against it. The one healthy computer
couldn't outvote the silent or failing ones exactly.
Speaker 2: The system lacked the necessary functional redundant. Instead of being
a safe mode solution, the voting logic itself became the
point of failure. The system couldn't trust the healthy computer
because it was being outvoted by its own internal system collapse.
Speaker 1: So what was the terminal event? What actually killed the mission?
Speaker 2: The official investigations concluded the most probable scenario was a
processor air that led to an irreversible loss of attitude control.
The control system just couldn't figure out which way the
spacecraft was facing anymore, and Phobos two began to tumble
uncontrollably through space.
Speaker 1: And once a deep space probe starts tumbling, that's usually
a fatal cascade failure unless it has a critical piece
of technology, which I'm guessing Phobos two lacked.
Speaker 2: That's the final nail in the coffin yea, the lack
of a proper safe mode architecture. A safe mode is
a crucial, non negotiable feature in modern spacecraft design. It's
a self preservation protocol. When the main computer realizes its
lost control, it automatically shuts down all the non essential systems,
and most critically, reorients the spacecraft solar arrays to point
at the Sun.
Speaker 1: So without a safe mode, what happened to Phobos two?
Speaker 2: The post mortem was chillingly simple. Because Phobos two was
tumbling uncontrollably, its solar arrays couldn't stay pointed at the Sun.
This led to a rapid and terminal depletion of the
main battery power. The loss of signal came hours later
when the batteries just died. It wasn't a sudden attack.
It was a slow, agonizing death by engineering inadequacy and
a predictable software flaw.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate anti climax for a great space mystery.
The system just cannibalized itself, but the myth persists because
of that alleged final image. We have to thoroughly address
the claims about the large cylindrical object and the giant shadow.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the cylindrical object. This goes right back
to the issue of corrupted data. When a tumbling, compromised
spacecraft tries to transmit data, especially using its high speed transmitter,
which Phobos two was already having trouble with, the telemetry
packets get corrupted, they get jumbled, and.
Speaker 1: When you try to reconstruc a visual image from that
corrupted data, what happens?
Speaker 2: You get artifacts, these transmission flaws. They often look like
straight lines or structured geometrical patterns. They're generated by the
error correction software trying to make sense of jumbled, non
contiguous data. To a non specialist looking at a blurry
artifacted reconstruction, these structured digital patterns, sometimes looking like cylinders
or straight lines, can easily be interpreted as a picture
of an.
Speaker 1: Object, when in reality they're a picture of the system's failure.
Speaker 2: That's it. The cylinder isn't a picture of an alien ship.
It's a visualization of a process or hiccup combined with
a weak, tumbling radio signal. The shape is a result
of the system collapse, not the cause of it.
Speaker 1: Okay, And what about the giant shadow that some people
claim to have seen in those final frames.
Speaker 2: That one is even more mundane, though it is spectacular
in its own right. The giant shadow is simply the
large elliptical shadow cast by Phobos itself under the surface
of Mars. Phobos is so close to Mars that when
it passes in front of the Sun from Mars perspective,
it casts a very large, defined shadow.
Speaker 1: We see this all the time with our Mars rovers
like opportunity and perseverance, don't.
Speaker 2: We we do. They often capture these amazing images of
the Phobos solar transit, this massive, rapid, irregularly shaped object
briefly eclipsing the Sun, casting a shadow that just races
across the Martian surface. If a non specialist sees a
heavily artifacted or compromised image showing that transit shadow, it's
easily misinterpreted as some massive anomalous object hovering nearby.
Speaker 1: So it's a totally normal atronomical phenomenon being confused with
an extraterrestrial threat exactly.
Speaker 2: And you have to remember the context. This was all
shrouded in Cold War drama and a lack of immediate transparency,
which just lets these theories.
Speaker 1: Fester, right, And we have to emphasize the historical context here.
The systemic failures within the Soviet and later Russian space
programs really validate the Phobos two conclusion. This wasn't a fluke,
not at all.
Speaker 2: We mentioned Phobos I failing because of a typo, and
much later the Phobos Grunt mission in twenty eleven, which
was supposed to return samples from Phobos, also failed catastrophically.
Speaker 1: Why did that one fail?
Speaker 2: Technical issues? Again? Specifically, they found it used non space
qualified parts and had gone through profoundly inadequate component and
system testing. This decade's long pattern of technical weakness, flawed architecture,
and component inadequacy just makes the forensic conclusion for FOCOS
too all the more believable. It failed due to internal
system level issues. It died of old space age design flaws.
Speaker 1: And there's one final detail that really undercuts the whole
cover up narrative, Isn't there.
Speaker 2: There is scientific transparency. While the final communication failed, high
level scientific data from the Phobos t ISM Infrared Spectrometer
is publicly archived. Researchers today can access the raw telemetry
and calibrated data. If there is a true smoking gun
image of an alien vessel, it would have been logistically
impossible to purge all traces of it when so much
of the mission's other data is readily available to researchers
all over the world.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's synthesize everything we've learned. We started with the
three pillars of the Phobos mystery a monolith, a curious astronaut,
and a vanished probe, and.
Speaker 2: We've really reconciled them with objective reality. The monolith is
an extreme geological fact, the astronaut's quote was a misquoted
public relations statement, and the probs vanishing was a predictable
technical post mortem.
Speaker 1: The true Phobos mysteries, it seems, are rooted not in
alien construction or conflict, but in the intense physics and
geological violence of a tiny moon that is literally under
constant title stress and falling apart.
Speaker 2: Let's review, the monolith. While it's enormous at ninety meters tall,
is almost certainly a chunk of impact ejecta, a dense,
unweathered rock fragment violently blasted out of the massive.
Speaker 1: Stigny crater, and its rectangular appearance is just an effect
of microgravity physics and our own brain seeing patterns are paradolia.
Speaker 2: And buzz Aldrin. The highly respected astronaut was championing a
mission to go study this natural curiosity, explicitly stating that
the universe put it there, which directly underlines the very
conspiracy he's often cited as confirming. He used the mystery
to sell the science.
Speaker 1: And the silence of Phobos too a tragic cascade failure.
It stemmed from a malfunctioning computer, a flawed three way
voting architecture, and the terminal lack of a solar oriented safe.
Speaker 2: Mode, and the alleged cylindrical object was just digital noise
misinterpreted when the whole system finally collapsed. The available evidence
is overwhelmingly consistent with Phobos being a porous rubble pile
with thirty percent empty space inside that is slowly being
shredded by Mars's gravity.
Speaker 1: And the monolith is maybe the most visible piece of
evidence of this violent geological history, just sitting precariously on
the surface exactly. So this brings us to future exploration
because these mysteries, whether they're resolved or not, continue to
drive scientific interest. The monolith itself remains a huge scientific target.
Why is that specific boulder still so valuable to planetary science.
Speaker 2: Because as it is a dense, coherent piece of rock
that was blasted from deep below the surface regolith. Unlike
all the dust on the surface which have been constantly
battered by solar radiation and micro meteorites for eons, the
monolith represents relatively pristine, unweathered subsurface.
Speaker 1: Material, so if we could get a sample from it.
Speaker 2: Retrieving a sample from it could provide the definitive empirical
answer to Phobos's origin debate. Is it made of carbonaceous
asteroid material from the Outer Solar System or is it
made of ancient Martian crust? It would finally tell us.
Speaker 1: That's the ultimate prize, and that's exactly why missions are
being planned around it. The proposed Canadian Prime mission, for example,
was explicitly designed to land right near the monolith to
analyze that exact subsurface ejecta.
Speaker 2: And the mission that is actually moving forward is from
the Japanese Airspace Exploration Agency JAXA. It's a Martian Moons
Exploration or MMX mission.
Speaker 1: When is that supposed to launch.
Speaker 2: It's scheduled to launch around twenty twenty six. MMX aims
to land, collect samples from Phobos regularly and then return
them to Earth by twenty thirty one. This mission is
designed to finally end the origin debate once and for all.
Speaker 1: It is just incredible to think that we are sending
this complex, multi billion dollar mission to retrieve samples from
a tiny, doomed moon before it literally turns into space dust.
Speaker 2: It creates a powerful mandate, doesn't it. It leaves us
with a final thought to ponder. We know Phobos is
destined to be ripped apart by Mars's gravity in thirty
to fifty million years, forming a temporary planetary ring. So
given the incredible engineering feed it will take to land
on a high porosity ruble pile and then return samples
from it. Should humanity prioritize recovering samples from this unique
doomed object, especially from something like the monolith before this
piece of planetary history is irrevocably scattered across the Martian sky.
What is the most important question you think the MMX
mission needs to answer about this moon's violent and fascinating
origin