Looking for all the world like the proverbial cheese in the sky is Mars' larger moon Phobos, as snapped from NASA's robot spacecraft Mars Express last week.
About 25 kilometres long, the moon features an amazing chain of meteor hits that must have been some blast, and intriguing grooves that look like it was tumbling in different directions hard up against something.
The Mars moons featured in Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Red Mars sci fi trilogy, where one was used as a minerals source and then anchor/ballast to build a space elevator - a cable running right down to the surface, with large elevators running along it.
First dreamed up by Arthur C Clarke (of course - he also 'invented' the geostationary satellite orbit that makes modern telecommunications possible), the space elevator is now the subject of serious research.
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