Scientists have discovered that Phobos occasionally reflects the solar wind, and scientists cannot yet explain how it does it.
There are already quite a lot of terrestrial spacecraft in the orbit of the Red Planet, which are studying both the planet itself and its satellites.
So a few years ago, scientists noticed thanks to the work of Mars Express (the device belongs to the European space agency), which, it turns out, Phobos creates a "backscatter" or, in other words, reflects solar particles. And at the same time, this process is of an episodic nature. And scientists decided to find out how this happens.
Why Phobos scatters the solar wind
For the first time, the scattering effect on Phobos was discovered back in 2008, and scientists became interested in this phenomenon, but bad luck during the next flights, no effect was recorded.
It was only in 2016 that Mars Express recorded an even stronger scatter than previously recorded, and at first the engineers thought that this effect was due to the spacecraft itself. And it was decided to test this hypothesis first.
As a result, all measuring instruments on Mars Express were reconfigured so that during the next flyby in 2017, all attention was focused only on the solar wind.
The experiment showed that Mars Express does not provoke reflection of solar particles on Phobos. But then scientists had another more interesting question: For what reason does such a reflection on Phobos appear sporadically?
As a result of the discussion, several theories of this "behavior" of Phobos emerged. So, in particular, some experts believe that the special magnetic field of the satellite is to blame, while others believe that the whole thing is in the cosmic dust on the surface of Phobos.
In order to solve this riddle, most likely, it will be necessary to directly study the satellite using lunar rovers. And that's what luck. The European Space Agency, together with Japanese specialists, is planning a special mission to study the moons of Mars.
So, as part of the implementation of this project, it is planned to launch an apparatus already in 2024, which will be landed to Phobos in 2025, and the lander will study the satellite more closely and is likely to find answers to questions.
In the meantime, the Mars Express device will continue to monitor the satellite and, probably, will reveal any more patterns and oddities in Phobos.
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