Phobos and Deimos in fiction Swift. In recognition of these mentions, many geological features of Phobos and Deimos are named after characters and places from "Gulliver's Travels", including among others "Laputa Regio" and "Lagado Planitia" on Phobos, and craters Swift and Voltaire on Deimos. Phobos and Deimos in fiction Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. Due to their small size, both moons were discovered only in 1877, by astronomer Asaph Hall. Nevertheless, they frequently feature in works of science fiction. Some of the earliest mentions of Mars's moons in fiction predate their discovery. In Jonathan Swift's famous satire "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), the astronomers of
Mars Global Surveyor shoot pictures of other orbiting bodies, such as other spacecraft and the moons of Mars. In 1998 it imaged what was later called the Phobos monolith, found in MOC Image 55103. After analyzing hundreds of high-resolution pictures of the Martian surface taken by the orbiting Mars Surveyor spacecraft, a team of researchers found that weathering and winds on the planet create landforms, especially sand dunes, remarkably similar to those in some deserts on Earth. Results from the "Mars Global Surveyor" primary mission (1996–2001) were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research by M. Malin and K. Edgett. Some of these