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The monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey was used by Stanley Kubrick the director to suggest that our intelligence was related to a mysterious structure that vibrated and resulted in human intelligence.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, second person to walk on the moon, speaks about the future of space exploration and says the public would be interested in a monolith on Phobos, one of the two small moons that revolve around Mars.

The Phobos monolith is a large rock on the surface of the moon Phobos, which orbits Mars.

The monolith is a bright object near Stickney crater (arrow point below), described as a "building sized" boulder, which casts a prominent shadow.

It is a boulder about 85 m (279 ft) across. A monolith is a geological feature consisting of a single massive piece of rock. Monoliths also occur naturally on Earth, but it has been suggested that the Phobos monolith may be a piece of impact ejecta.

It was discovered by Efrain Palermo, who did large surveys of Martian probe imagery, and later confirmed by Lan Fleming, an imaging sub-contractor at NASA Johnson Space Center.

The general vicinity of the monolith is a proposed landing site for a Canadian Space Agency vehicle, funded by Optech and the Mars Institute, for an unmanned mission to Phobos known as PRIME (Phobos Reconnaissance and International Mars Exploration). The PRIME mission would be composed of an orbiter and lander, and each would carry four instruments designed to study various aspects of Phobos' geology.[5] At present, PRIME has not been funded and does not have a projected launch date.

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.