MOSCOW, July 4 – RIA Novosti. Mars could have just three moons in the past – they are incurred as a result of the collision of small planetesimals from the “germ” of the red planet and the largest of births moons already managed to fall on the surface of Mars, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
Today, Mars revolves around two small irregularly shaped satellites – Phobos and Deimos diameter of 22 and 12 kilometers away from the surface of the red planet by only 10 and 23 thousand kilometers. Today, many scientists believe that both these moons are not planets, and asteroids captured by the attraction of Mars in the distant past.
What is interesting, is moving closer to Phobos and Mars will be destroyed and turned into a giant dust ring 20-40 millions of years, and Deimos, on the contrary, removed from it, and in the distant future, it “escapes” from the red planet. Now, scientists have difficulty explaining why this is happening, and how Deimos and Phobos could be in their current orbits.
Space Tragedy
The unusual character movement of Deimos and Phobos, it is said Pascal Rosenblatt (Pascal Rosenblatt) of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and colleagues, forced scientists to doubt the fact that Phobos and Deimos are asteroids, and prompted them to look for alternative explanations for the existence of the moons of Mars.
Rosenblatt and his colleagues suggested that the moons of Mars are having about the same manner as our Moon – in a cosmic accident, collision “germ” of the Earth and Teyi, the progenitor of the Moon. They checked, could this actually be using a computer model of a newborn Mars, they face a planetary embryos of different masses, the composition and size.
As shown by their calculations, this really could happen, but in this the case was not born one, but three moons of Mars, the story of one of which ended very tragically. This companion of the red planet, according to calculations European planetary scientists, is the result of a collision of Mars embryo and planetesimals diameter of 2000 km.
As a result of this collision in space has been thrown out 100 million gigatons of rock (10 in 20 degree kilogram ), about 2% of them “blind” in yet unnamed moon revolves close enough to Mars and other breeds were united in miniature likeness of the protoplanetary disk in which was born the Earth and other planets. Following this accident can be the north polar basin on Mars, which many scientists believe a giant impact crater, and not just the bottom of parched Martian ocean.
Three Mars moon
The birth of the first moon of Mars specially affect the behavior of the disc – two areas of increased density in it appeared, which eventually turned into Phobos and Deimos, whose formation would have been impossible without the “protection” of her. Thus, this companion of the red planet served as a kind of “midwife” for the two advanced satellites of Mars
She herself lived a very short life -. In accordance with the calculations of Rosenblatt, it fell back to Mars after 5 million years of field his birth, resulting in an orbit were two unusual moons, one of which is moving closer to Mars, and the other – is removed from it
Check this theory is simple enough -. it is enough to compare the proportion of isotopes of different substances in the rocks Phobos , Deimos and Mars. According to scientists, if their idea is true, then the rock moons of Mars will be half composed of matter of their ancestor, faced with the red planet, and half of the Martian rocks.
This test will be available in the next decade, when Phobos will be sent to the Russian “Phobos-Grunt-2″, as well as after the completion of the Japanese mission, the MMX, the aim of which is to collect rock samples from Mars satellites and delivering them to Earth in the years 2020.
The mechanism of birth moons of Mars, resulting” cosmic accident “
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