On this day in space: Jan. 29, 1989: Phobos 2 enters orbit around Mars

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On January 29, 1989, a Soviet space probe named Phobos 2 arrived in orbit around Mars.

On January 29, 1989, a Soviet space probe named Phobos 2 arrived in orbit around Mars.

An artist's illustration of the Phobos 2 mission to the Mars moon Phobos launched by the former Soviet Union. It arrived in orbit around Mars on Jan. 29, 1989. (Image credit: NASA/JPL)

Phobos 2's journey to the Red Planet took about 6 and a half months, and it spent the next two months taking pictures of the two moons and gathering data on Mars' atmosphere. It brought along two small landers to drop on Phobos, but mission control lost contact with the spacecraft before those landers made it to the Martian moon.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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