Thomas Anderson

singer, songwriter, rock 'n' roller

Martian Lore #3

by Thomas Anderson

from the album Beyond That Point

Mars has two moons -- Phobos and Deimos. Their names mean "fear" and "panic." Fit companions for a planet named for the Roman god of war. Since their discovery in the 1800s, the two small moons have perplexed astronomers. For such small moons, they have an unaccountably bright reflectivity; also, the orbital speed of Phobos seems to be gradually accelerating. This phenomenon has never been witnessed with any other moon in the solar system. One theory suggested that if the moon had a very low density, the orbital acceleration could be accounted for by contact with the Martian exosphere.

This in turn led to an interesting idea, first proposed in the late 1950s in the Soviet Union, by the astrophysicist Iosef Shklovskii. He proposed that the low density of the two moons could be explained by the moons being hollow, and the most likely explanation for them being hollow was that they were artificially constructed. Phobos and Deimos, he proposed, were two gigantic space stations built by a highly advanced Martian civilization. This also explained why they hadn't been spotted before the 19th century -- they simply hadn't been built yet.

His American colleague Carl Sagan suggested that perhaps they weren't artificially constructed outposts of Martian life, but were possibly asteroids reigned in to Martian orbit, and ingeniously hollowed out by the planet's inhabitants.

Again, the phantasm of a Martian civilization appeared in our Earth-bound eyes for a moment, and in another moment, when the Viking Orbiter photos reached the Earth in the mid-1970s, vanished again. Phobos and Deimos were simply two misshapen rocks, tumbling blindly in space. The peculiarities of the moons? Still, no one knows.