Who's afraid of Phobos? The residents of Grenoble might be--if this image of the Mars moon looming over the French town were real. But the fantastical image is the work of Ludovic Celle, a Grenoble artist who finds inspiration in the Red Planet and its moons.
"Since I've started being interested by Mars," Celle wrote on his website, "I am fascinated by the scale of the planet and its features, and of course, there is Phobos, its largest moon (the other one being Deimos). What better way to give a scale than to compare with actual things on Earth?"
The rocky moon appears massive, nearly shadowing the entire city in Celle's eye-catching image. But don't be fooled. While Phobos is the bigger of Mars's two moons, it's still tiny compared to other satellites orbiting the planets in our solar system.
Phobos has a mean radius of 11 kilometers. Earth's moon has a radius of 1,737 kilometers. And what about the largest moon in our solar system? Jupiter's moon Ganymede has a mean radius of 2,631.2 kilometers.
Phobos was discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall. The moon was named after the mythological son of Ares (also known as Mars) whose name "Phobos" means "fear."
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