How did Mars purchase its moons?
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Texas A&M University
The thriller of the place Mars’s two moons got here from may lastly be solved. If Phobos and Deimos have been formed when an icy object smashed into Mars, it may clarify their contradictory properties, which have lengthy baffled researchers.
Measurements of the geological make-up of Phobos and Deimos, together with tentative indicators of water, have steered that they’re extra just like asteroids than to Mars itself, hinting that they may be captured asteroids. However, that rationalization wouldn’t account for his or her round orbits, which as an alternative trace…