Within 50 million years, the moon will either collide with Mars or become a ring of rubble around it; stretch marks on its surface are likely early signs "We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves," Terry Hurford, a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who led a study about stretch marks, said in a Deimos, on the other hand, is slowly drifting away from the planet.While no mission has explored Phobos and Deimos as its primary objective, several spacecraft have snapped pictures during flybys. In 2003, If viewed from Mars's surface near its equator, full Phobos looks about one-third as big as a full moon on Earth.
Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. Speedy Phobos rises in the west, sets in the east, and rises again in just eleven hours, while Deimos, being only just outside The origin of the Martian moons is still controversial.Phobos could be a second-generation Solar System object that Another hypothesis is that Mars was once surrounded by many Phobos- and Deimos-sized bodies, perhaps ejected into orbit around it by a collision with a large The moons of Mars may have started with a huge collision with a protoplanet one third the mass of Mars that formed a ring around Mars.
New York, Captured bodies tend to move more erratically. The twin boys, Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Dread or Panic), attended their father in battle.But the sons won't be in attendance around Mars forever. The two tiny bodies had been hidden in the glare from the planet.Hall named the two satellites for the sons of the Greek god of war, Ares (Mars to the Romans). The average diameter of Phobos is 22.2 kilometers. Naval Observatory in Washington DC, who subsequently named them after the offspring of the deities Aphrodite (Venus) and Ares (Mars). It travels around the planet three times a day, zipping across the Martian sky approximately once every four hours. Later, the large moon crashed into Mars, but the two small moons remained in orbit.
Others maintain that those moons may have formed when Mars did or are the result of some catastrophic event early in the history of the solar system.
Both moons take stable, nearly circular paths around the red planet.
An atmosphere could have slowed the pair down and settled them into their present-day orbits, but the air on the Martian planet is thin and insufficient for such a task.It is possible that the moons formed like the planet, from debris left over from the creation of Mars. The first was NASA's Mariner 9 spacecraft, which orbited the planet Mars starting in 1971. In particular, the Curiosity rover has taken some great photos and videos of Phobos and Deimos, including footage of Phobos eclipsing the sun.
Gravity could have drawn the remaining rocks into the two oddly shaped bodies.Or, the moons could have spawned from a violent birth, much like "Solving the riddle of how Mars' moons came to be will help us better understand how planets formed around our Sun and, in turn, around other stars," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), said in a For years, scientists thought that Mars had no moon. It took pictures of Deimos and Phobos from afar and showed that these were small moons that looked like potatoes.Several other orbiting spacecraft have performed long-range observations, including NASA's Viking orbiters (1970s and 1980s), the Soviet Phobos 2 mission (1980s), NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (1990s and 2000s), the European Mars Express mission (2000s), and NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission).