Throughout extra flybys of Deimos deliberate for later this 12 months, “we’re going to get to round 200 kilometers [124 miles], and that’s nonetheless fairly good knowledge,” she says. “That may assist us perceive the moon.”
Are Phobos and Deimos captured asteroids?
The mission to take the brand new pictures of Deimos, with Mars looming massive within the background, allowed the probe’s two spectrometers to document essential knowledge in regards to the moon’s composition.
These preliminary readings are preliminary and can be refined in later flybys. However they recommend Deimos is product of rocky materials just like Mars itself, and never the carbon-rich rock that will be anticipated if Deimos was a captured asteroid, as scientists as soon as suspected.
That helps theories that each Deimos and Phobos — Mars’ bigger moon, which is sort of 17 miles (27 km) throughout at its widest level — fashioned in orbit when a big object, maybe a dwarf planet, struck Mars within the distant previous. If confirmed, that will put to relaxation long-standing theories that each Phobos and Deimos are asteroids which were captured by Mars’ gravity.
However many questions stay, together with whether or not Phobos has the identical composition as Deimos. Each Martian moons are additionally small and irregularly formed, which helps the concept they’re captured asteroids; and each are optically very darkish, in contrast to Mars itself, which suggests they might have a special origin than the Purple Planet.
