SUBJECT: MORE INFO/HISTORY OF THE PHOBOS/MARS OBSERVER STORY
FILE: UFO2023
NASA lost radio contact with its Mars Observer spacecraft on Saturday August
21, 1993, just days before it was expected to enter into a circular orbit 400
km above the surface of the planet. Orbit insertion was supposed to have
occured on Tuesday August 24th at about 1:30 PM Pacific Daylight Time.
The spacecraft was expected to begin global surface mapping of Mars on
December 16th that would have lasted an entire Martian year of 687 Earth
days. Various attempts were made to re-establish contact with the spacecraft,
but so far the Mars Observer has remained silent. NASA engineers believe a
transistor in the satellite's clock failed, rendering the Mars Observer
"brain-dead" and radio silent. It seems improbable that the spacecraft
automatically entered into orbit around Mars, and probably missed its
destination completely. The Mars Observer was launched on September 25, 1992
on a Titan III rocket from Cape Canveral Air Force Station, Florida.
On July 26, 1993 at 8:52 PM PDT, the Mars Observer returned its first image
of Mars when it was 5.8 million kilometers from the red planet. That image
was taken using the spacecraft's high resolution, narrow angle telescopic
camera. In 1976 an unmanned NASA Viking spacecraft sucessfully photographed
the surface of Mars from an altitude of approximately 1700 kilometers. The
objective of the Viking mission was to search for evidence of intelligent
life on Mars, either now or in the past. Image 35A72 taken by Viking-1 and
received by the Jet Propulsion Lab showed a mile-long, 1500 foot high
humanoid "face" staring into eternity on the surface of Mars. It was later
dismissed without investigation by NASA as a "trick of light and shadow" and
filed away. Frame 70A13 taken over the same area with a higher sun-angle
showed the same feature in addition to a pyramid-like structure approximately
16 kilometers southwest of the "face". In 1980, Vicent DiPietro and Gregory
Molenaar, imaging engineers under contract to NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center on another project, stumbled across these Viking images. After
further investigation they discovered folds and horizontal stripes on the
"headpiece" or "helmet" of the face which resembled those of Egyptian
Pharaohs, symmetrical cheekbones, an eye socket, eyeball, and pupil, nose,
mouth, and teeth. The facial proportions were found to be similar to those
of early man. DiPietro and Molenaar published their findings and
conclusions in 1980 and were stonewalled by the planetary science community
for doing so. In a feature article in "Soviet Life" magazine published in
1984, the Russians revealed their own fascination with the Martian "sphinx"
and five-sided pyramids found in the Viking photos. In an effort to carry
out their own investigations, the former USSR launched Phobos I and Phobos
II, two unmanned satellites to the planet Mars on July 12, 1988. The reason
for launching two craft was for redundancy in case one malfunctioned. Phobos
I was lost after it received a bad command during its journey to Mars and
fell silent when controllers tried to re-acquire it on the way. Phobos II
arrived in January 1989 and entered an orbit around Mars as the first phase
towards its real destination, a small Martian moon called Phobos. The
mission was flawless until the craft aligned itself with Phobos. On March 28,
1989, an elliptical object was detected to be moving towards the satellite
seconds before it failed. All indications were that the elliptical object
had collided with the satellite which was now dead and left spinning out of
control. On March 28, 1989 Tass, the official Soviet news agency stated:
"Phobos II failed to communicate with Earth as scheduled after completing
an operation yesterday around the Martian moon Phobos. Scientists at
mission control have been unable to establish stable radio contact." The
next day a top official of the Soviet Space Agency (Glavkosmos) stated:
"Phobos II is 99% lost for good." It is important to note that he stated
the entire satellite was gone and not that just radio contact was lost with
it. On March 30, 1989 at 4:41 PM EST, the Associated Press released the
following statement: "Soviet research centers are now trying to interpret
so far 'unexplained optical phonomena' on the pictures of the Martian
surface. The pictures show an inigmatic strip 23-25 miles wide and a
large spindle-shaped formation." On March 31, 1989 headlines dispatched
by the Moscow correspondents of the European News Agency (EFE) stated:
"Phobos 2 Captured Strange Photos of Mars Before Losing Contact With It's
Base. Vremya revealed yesterday that the space probe Phobos II, which was
orbiting above Mars when Soviet scientists lost contact with it on Monday,
had photographed an unidentified object on the Martian surface seconds
before losing contact." Scientists described the unidentified object as
a thin ellipse 20 kilometers in length. It was further stated that the photos
could not be an illusion because they were captured by 2 different color
cameras as well as cameras taking infrared shots. One controller at the
Kaliningrad control center concluded that the Phobos II probe was left
spinning out of control, a result of being struck or shot. In the October
19, 1989 issue of Nature Magazine, Soviet scientists concluded that the craft
could be spinning because it was impacted. Not since the NASA Viking missions
in 1976 has there been a successful unmanned mission to Mars. NASA's Mars
Observer is simply the latest in a series of spacecraft destined for Mars
that failed unexpectedly just prior to reaching the planet. The mystery
continues.
**********************************************
* THE U.F.O. BBS -
http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo *
**********************************************
