The European Space Agency has released close-up portraits of Mars's moon Phobos, taken as the ESA Mars Express spacecraft flew within 60 miles of it.
Showing a multitude of mysterious grooves etched into Phobos' surface, the images were captured Jan. 9, an ESA release accompanying the images reported Monday.
"This was an exceptional flyby where for the first time we could cover a large part of the far side of Phobos' Southern Hemisphere," Mars Express scientist Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin said.
Resolving features as small as 17 yards across, they show in detail the currently planned landing sites for the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission scheduled for launch later this year, the ESA said.
The Russian craft would be the first probe to land on Phobos, Alexander Basilevsky of the Phobos-Grunt team at the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow said.
Scientists can construct high-resolution topographic maps of the landing sites from the images to help help determine where Phobos-Grunt will ultimately touch down, the ESA said.
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