Could astronauts ever land on the surface of Mars’ moon phobos?
Not phobos, because it doesn’t have much gravity, so it wouldn’t be practical to colonise. popular opinion is that phobos and Deimos are actually captured asteroids, so we could use them for other things instead of setting up a base. We could do Mars sample-return missions from either moon because there is debris from Mars on them. This is because over billions of years Mars shot up debris from the surface thanks to now-dormant or extinct volcanoes and meteorite impacts, so scientists think we could find samples of Mars on the surface of phobos and Deimos, using robots to search for them.
Another reason scientists want to go to the moons is to better understand asteroids. one of the discussions we’ve had in the US for over a decade now is whether we should stop at an asteroid before going to Mars, and if you go to phobos or Deimos you’re killing two birds with one stone – they are asteroids where you can learn about both Mars and about small asteroidal bodies. To land a robot on phobos you would need some kind of system of harpoons and drills like the lander on the rosetta probe had and to do a lot of thruster moves as there isn’t enough gravity to land like you would on Mars. Chris Carberry is the executive director and co-founder of Explore Mars Inc, a non-profit organisation that was created to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades