A NASA study using a series of supercomputer simulations reveals a potential new way Mars' two moons formed.How Did Mars Get Its Moons? | 1:48
NASA's Ames Research Center | 130K subscribers | 23,930 views | November 20, 2024
Posted on 12/29/2024 10:06:13 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Led by Jacob Kegerreis, the team's new study revealed that a rogue asteroid may have passed too close to Mars. During its flyby, Mars' strong gravitational pull would have disrupted, or ripped apart, the asteroid, leading to hundreds of thousands of small rocky fragments orbiting Mars.
While more than half of the fragments created from the disruption event are believed to have been ejected away from Mars, those trapped within the planet's orbit would have continued to collide, creating more debris. After these collisions stopped and the fragments settled into a ring around Mars, the material within the rings likely began clumping together, creating the Phobos and Deimos we know today...
The Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission is a Martian sample return mission led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that will travel to both Phobos and Deimos. While at the moons, MMX will extensively study the moons and their characteristics to learn more about their composition and origin. While at Phobos, the MMX spacecraft will collect samples of the moon's surface to return to Earth, where it will be sent to a lab for in-depth study. The internal composition of the moons (i.e. what they're made of) could be the major clue that helps scientists determine whether or not the moons were once asteroids or the results of an impact/disruption event.
MMX is currently set for launch in 2026 and features a variety of instruments and technology demonstrations, including NASA's Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma Rays and Neutrons (MEGANE) instrument and a pneumatic sampler technology demonstration.
(Excerpt) Read more at nasaspaceflight.com ...
A NASA study using a series of supercomputer simulations reveals a potential new way Mars' two moons formed.How Did Mars Get Its Moons? | 1:48
NASA's Ames Research Center | 130K subscribers | 23,930 views | November 20, 2024
The keywords, sorted:
The Bemmies ain't going to like that.
Not a NASA website. Believed to, would have, likely. This is not an article of facts. It is speculation. Postulating a complex sequence of events and creating a computer simulation to demonstrate how it is possible for that sequence of events to have actually occurred. This is not science. If a body flew by Mars and was broken into pieces then became more pieces and then a ring which has since disappeared and now only two tiny pieces are left, it’s too much explanation than necessary.
Diemos and Phobos were most likely captured from the asteroid belt which is kind of close to Mars and has lots of asteroids in the size range of Mars’ moons. This is the result of a study made by me using the computing power of a human brain and repeating similar studies done by large numbers of other human brains.
So, like, who cares about speculating how they formed or were captured? Just wait long enough and it won't matter.
/s
It is part of the process, as long as one calls the product a hypothesis and not a postulate. From the language of the report, I don't think they are. Before one could justify the expense of a consequent experiment (go look and get samples), one would have to generate findings consistent with the hypothesis. That's what this model appears to me to be. If said experiment requires political backing to expend the capital, one can forgive a bit of hyperbole in generating popular support as long as it doesn't distort the actual proposal.
Diemos and Phobos were most likely captured from the asteroid belt which is kind of close to Mars and has lots of asteroids in the size range of Mars’ moons.
Looks like your language is similarly couched in the hypothetical.
Saturns rings are “raining” down on Saturn. They are decaying. The rings on Mars may have suffered the same fate instead of clumping together.
Why does entropy cause everything to fall apart, except when planet or moon building?
Liberals and Democrats.
Consider the way economies of scale tend to concentrate capital.
It’s as good a theory as any. Most of the dust that makes up the Zodiacal Light is thought to have originated from mars, and a captured asteroid breaking up in Mars’ orbit would explain that.
I was told that those two moons are spacecraft that were fashioned from asteroids. They were used to bring about 1/2 of the Palladian ancestors to Mars. It is true, somebody told me that.
An interesting aspect of Mars’s moons is that they orbit counter to the direction of Mars’s rotation. The tidal transfer of angular momentum from earth to our moon results in the moon receding at a rate of about one centimeter (roughly 3/8 inches) a year away from earth. The same phenomenon on Mars causes his moons’ orbit to gradually decrease, and in a few million years they will enter Mars’s atmosphere and deorbit, crashing into the surface! What a spectacle our descendants will be able to witness!
It is “speculation”, but based on physical models, and proposes one theory of the genesis of Mars’s moons. Phobos is well withing the Roche limit of Mars. If Phobos were a “rubble pile”, it would already have broken up. It must be held together by tensile strength, which reinforces your argument.
But it seems to me the first step to fixing Mars is to get the solar wind to stop stripping atmosphere off of it. Either create a magnetic field on Mars, or put up a magnetic shield in the Lagrange point between Mars and the Sun.
Yes, but unfortunately, either of those endeavors are far beyond our capabilities and budget. We'll be better off burrowing and building surface shelters.
I read papers for both of these ideas, but I think the Lagrange point one has a major flaw.
To create a magnetotail that encompasses Mars, it’s going to take a gargantuan magnetic field. Putting aside the uncertainty as to whether we can create a steady-state field that strong, I think the real idea-killer will be the solar wind.
A satellite generating that field will be taking in planetary-scale solar wind levels. Since it will be in a vacuum, I don’t think we have any hope of radiating away that much energy before it quickly melts the spacecraft.
The other solution I read about was running a superconducting cable all the way around the planet. It postulated the cable would be made of BSCCO, 5-6” thick, and cooled by LN2. You’d probably have to oversize it to account for imperfections, but if you had 100 roving machines that could extrude the cable you could place them 120 miles apart and they could gradually build segments as long as they’re kept supplied.
The truth is they are just guessing.
No, that’s not ‘the truth’.
Yes, it is. It’s a guess based upon known gravitational physics but it’s still just a guess. Just like the age and origin of the universe is just a guess that, thanks to the Webb telescope, changes all the time. That is if you prescribe to the theory that everything came from nothing for no reason.
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