Moons of Mars attention when Houston's claim was repeated in earnest by a Soviet scientist, Iosif Shklovsky, who, based on a later-disproven density estimate, suggested Phobos was a hollow metal shell. Searches have been conducted for additional satellites. In 2003, Scott S. Sheppard and David C. Jewitt surveyed nearly the entire Hill sphere of Mars for irregular satellites. However scattered light from Mars prevented them from searching the inner few arcminutes where the satellites Phobos and Deimos reside. No new satellites were found to an apparent limiting red magnitude of 23.5, which corresponds to radii of about 0.09 km using an albedo of
Transit of Phobos from Mars 57.75 seconds to get a time of 20:49:02.4 UTC for the center of the shadow. Putting in the longitude/latitude/altitude coordinate values -124,14,0 into JPL Horizons gives an expected time of 20:49 for the transit, which is in good agreement once again. On 1 September 1999 the distance between the Earth and Mars was 9.9 light-minutes. Transit of Phobos from Mars A transit of Phobos across the Sun as seen from Mars takes place when Phobos passes directly between the Sun and a point on the surface of Mars, obscuring a large part of the Sun's disc for an observer on