Next Manned Mission May be to Mars' Moons

The Earth's Moon is only a three-day flight, however scientists would rather send astronauts to the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. A primary reason for this choice is the fact that Moon's gravity is one-sixth of Earth's. It's a strong enough difference that a landing craft has to fire retrorockets to slow its descent to the surface and again when it leaves the Moon. This wastes tons of expensive fuel and adds millions of dollars to the cost of the mission. The two moons of Mars are much smaller. Phobos is the size of Manhattan and Deimos is about a third as large. Their size causes their gravitational pull to be only one-thousandth that of Earth, making the moons as easy to land on as docking with another spaceship. Going to the Martian moons will also be much cheaper than sending a crewed mission to the Martian surface. Putting someone on Mars could cost $200-300 billion dollars, including the cost of decades of research. The bill for a mission to Deimos could be as low as $30 billion. Currently, the only planned missions to the moons are robotic. Russia will launch the Phobos-Grunt mission in 2009 that will attempt to land on Phobos to collect the first samples from the moon's surface and return them to scientists back on Earth. The mission will help determine whether there is hydrogen or water present, which astronauts could use on a later crewed mission. Scientists say that a crewed mission should first go to Phobos because it is closer to Mars and bigger than Deimos. Because of how close Phobos is to Mars, it is more likely to harbor ancient meteorites blasted up from Mars. However, these missions would not be without its hare of perils. Dust could be a huge problem in Phobos' weak gravity field. There could be a layer of dust four or five meters thick that would be stirred easily. Scientists have theorized that the moons may be asteroids captured by Mars' gravitational pull or they could be the remnants of a single moon that was blasted apart by a massive impact. Until further research is conducted, scientists will continue to dream of a mission like this.

An article by Thaindian News on this topic can be found at this link:
http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/mans-next-planetary-foray-maybe-on-the-moons-of-mars_1004406.html