| abstract | - Phobos Surveyor is a mission concept under preliminary study by Marco Pavone of Stanford University, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program. The concept consists of an orbiter around Mars's moon Phobos, designed to take measurements of the surface such as chemical composition and deploy small, sea-urchin-shaped rovers to the surface. These rovers would perform more detailed analysis of the moon's microscopic geological features and other properties, beaming their information back to the orbiter, which in turn would send the information to Earth. The mission could be a Discovery-class mission, and could be beneficial to the future manned space program by investigating the low-gravity Phobos's suitability for a manned base before the construction of one on Mars itself and where on the moon landing sites for manned missions should be. Although designed with "Phobos in mind" according to Pavone, this technology could be applied to missions to other small Solar System bodies.
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