Post Vistage (294): The last act of a doomed moon
Post Vistage (294): The last act of a doomed moon
The destruction of Phobos, the largest satellite of Mars, it could have started already.
If a traveler arrived from the land You will land on the red planet, one of the clearest evidences you would have of finding yourself in another world would have it moving quickly over your head in the night sky. And it is that to see two moons would clear any dugives. Nothing to do with the huge Moon terrestrial, since in this case they are possibly asteroids captured at some point in the remote past, but together, with their curious dance in which each one seems to move in opposite directions, endow the Martian firmament with something unique, a beauty that would surely hypnotize its potential first settlers, of which it is easy to imagine them watching this celestial spectacle for hours.
But every show must end some day, and the one that offers Phobos, the biggest of them all, the one that stands out in the night to have a recognizable shape and not be, as it happens to Deimos, only a very bright star, and the one that would be more "alien" to us when seeing it cross the sky up to 3 times in a same day, is facing its final act. It will not be a quick end on a human scale, but for She, who is perhaps as old as the Solar System itself, only 30 to 50 million years of life ahead is hardly a sigh. And his fall into oblivion could have already begun.
Separated from the surface of Mars by just 6,000 kilometers (the closest satellite to your planet that is known), the gravitational tides cause it to slow down even more, at a rate of about 2 meters per century, and approaching the one known as Limit of Roche, the point of no return in which the difference between the pull of one side and another will be so great that it will tear it apart, giving rise to a spectacular, albeit transient, ring of remains. Hence, that time period is marked as the moment of its final catastrophic.
But although still far in time, at least from our perception of reality, the signs of his fateful destiny, that the process of destruction may have already begun, could already be drawn on his face. It is one of the most striking features that we see in the images of Phobos, a series of parallel fractures that for a long time were thought to be the result of collisions suffered in this small moon, especially the one that formed the great crater Stickney, but a new study and new models now indicate that they are the first signs of a global structural failure that, in the end, will destroy it. "We believe that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign is the formation of these grooves"explains Terry Hurford of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
Although it was thought for a long time Phobos as a solid body, today it is thought that it is basically a pile of rubble, barely maintained grouped by its common gravity, surrounded by a layer of regolith 100 meters thick. That is, an outer layer with some cohesion surrounding an interior that is not so much, that can be easily distorted, forcing the outer layer to readjust. This would behave in an elastic way, adapting to the changes, but at the same time weak enough so that these tensions, increasing over time as the distance with Mars it is reduced, cause it to end up failing. And this is what seems to be already happening.We are living, if this is the case, the principio of the slow agony of Phobos, which will end within a few million years,Finally, his resistance it breaks definitely. It is not something that should worry us, andto that from our tempo scaleThat's still far away, and pathe first oneshumans who tread the planet, and even for their possible settlers permanent Your presence it will be a familiar element, indisthinkable, as si was part of it nature of the planet and therefore that forever have been there and always be. But it will be an illusion, the last glimpses of a long story to puto finish. The curtain, for Fobos, is about to cerr by last time.
The parallel fractures that travel this moon. At the beginningipio was thought to be the fruit of the tensions generated by the great impact that Formo The crater Stickney, at the top, but not expandgo radially with respect to this last always sowed doubts about this. Now they are given a new and fateful explanation.
Phobos is very close to Mars, just 6000 km above the surface of the planet. There is no other planetary satellite that lives so close to your planet. And that will have fatal consequences in the long run.
One of the ideas about the future human exploration of Mars is to use Phobos as a kind of advanced base where to launch to the surface. Its proximity and very low gravity make it ideal for it.
The moons of Mars are tiny, while the Moon is large disproportionately with respect to Earth to be a satellite.
Phobos and Deimos in the night sky of Mars, seen by the Curiosity rover. They could not be so visible if they were not so close to the planet, given their small size, barely ten kilometers in the case of the first.Mars' Moon Phobos is Slowly Falling Apart
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