Main page of the Phobos section here.
|
Another Phobos picture, released on Canadian TV, presents an infrared scan radiometer image of the Martian surface that showed clearly defined rectangular areas. These are interconnected with a latticework of perfectly straight channels, much resembling a city block. There were no corresponding surface features taken by regular cameras. This suggests the heat signature of what may be a set of underground cavern or channels that are just too geometrically regular to be formed naturally. According to Dr. John Becklake of the London Science Museum, "The city-like pattern is 60 kilometers wide and could be easily be mistaken for an aerial view of Los Angeles." The final picture taken by Phobos 2 before it was "shot out of orbit" has never been publicly released. One report indicated that it was presented at a closed meeting with US and British officials. In the 19 October 1989 issue of "Nature', Soviet scientists published a series of technical reports on the experiments Phobos 2 did manage to conduct: of the thirty seven pages, a mere paragraph deals with the spacecraft's loss. The report confirms that the spacecraft was spinning, either because of a computer malfunction or because Phobos 2 was "impacted" by an unknown object. And so we see that it is not only NASA that is apparently involved in suppressing photographs and knowledge of other planets, but the Russian space program as well. |
