Lander (spacecraft) 2012. Planned for 2018, NASA's Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher lander mission was cancelled due to budget cuts. Exploration of Mars including the use of landers continues to this day. Amongst them, Russia has planned a Mars sample return mission Mars-Grunt for near 2026, and China for near 2030. While several flybys conducted by Mars orbiting probes have provided images and other data about the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, only few of them intended to land on the surface of these satellites. Two probes under the Soviet Phobos program were successfully launched in 1988, but in 1989 the intended landings on
Phobos monolith astronaut Buzz Aldrin has spoken about the Phobos monolith and his support for a mission to Phobos. The object appears in Mars Global Surveyor images SPS252603 and SPS255103, dated 1998. The object is unrelated to another monolith located on the surface of Mars, which NASA noted as an example of a common surface feature in that region. Phobos monolith The Phobos monolith is a large rock on the surface of Mars's moon Phobos. It is a boulder about across and tall. A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock. Monoliths also occur naturally on