To boldly go where no machine has gone before. That dream may soon become a reality for a team of Hong Kong university engineers who have been given the opportunity to design a piece of machinery vital to a mission to probe Phobos, the innermost moon to Mars.
For the team from Polytechnic University, it is a second chance to delve into the secrets of space after their last project, the Mars Rock Corer, disappeared on board the European Space Agency's ill-fated Beagle 2 Lander that reportedly crashed on Mars in 2003.
Their brief this time is to design a machine, weighing merely 230 grams and slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, which will sift and grind material into a uniform size of slightly less than 1mm in diameter in preparation for analysis by the Phobos-Grunt Lander, scheduled for launch in 2009. The mission is a joint collaboration between Russia and China.
'The last project to Mars was to discover the origin of life. This project is to discover the origin of the solar system,' said Professor Yung Kai-leung, associate head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at PolyU, and head designer for the soil preparation system.
The origin of Mars' two satellites, Phobos - named after the Greek god of fear - and its smaller sister Deimos, is shrouded in mystery. Some of the darkest objects to have appeared through the lens of a telescope, they were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall in 1877. But the two moons of Mars were actually described 150 years earlier in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726, long before the age of powerful telescopes, and is regarded by scientists as an amazing coincidence.
Phobos orbits less than 6,000km above the surface of Mars, closer to a planet than any other moon in the solar system, and getting lower as it spirals faster and faster inward toward Mars. This phenomenon, known as secular acceleration, has inspired spectacular theories about the source and particular nature of the potato-shaped moon that are quite literally out of this world.