Phobos


 * This article is about the location. For the 1998 Top 100 award-winner, see Phobos (WAD)

Phobos is the larger and innermost of the two moons of the planet Mars, the second being Deimos. It is the scene of the first Doom episode, Knee-Deep in the Dead. "Phobos" is the name of a god in Greek mythology and it can be translated as "panic fear", "flight" or "battlefield rout".

In Doom, Phobos is depicted with Earth-like gravity, a thick atmosphere, and having tall, seemingly vegetation-covered mountains; the sky texture for the episode was derived from a photograph taken of Yangshuo Cavern in China.

In reality, Phobos is a rock 22 kilometers in diameter with gravity less than a thousandth of that on Earth, and no atmosphere (even if an atmosphere could be generated artificially, the gravity would be insufficient to hold it in place). Phobos' gravity is so weak that a human being could escape it by jumping. In order to be more plausible, Doom 3 moved the plot to Mars.