Emily Lakdawalla • March 9, 2009
Mars' outer moon Deimos is an underappreciated sibling to the larger, closer, and much-better-mapped Phobos, so I was delighted to see today that the sharp-eyed HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently captured two lovely color images of Deimos. Without further ado, here they are. Just to be different from the bajillion other space bloggers who'll likely post these photos today, I've rotated both of the images so that the north pole is up and the equator is (roughly) horizontal.
NASA / JPL / UA
One indicator of how little attention has been paid to Deimos is the number of place names that have been formally approved for it. Are you ready for the complete map of all named places on Deimos? Here you go:
For more fun with Deimos, here's a link to my earlier post on Chuck Clark's cut-and-assemble model of Deimos; here's views of both Phobos and Deimos from CRISM, the imaging spectrometer on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; and here's some random space facts on Phobos and Deimos from Bruce Betts.
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