![]() The Emirates Mars Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) on board Hope is the most sensitive that has ever orbited Mars, a capability that proved crucial to observing the dark Martian moon, he said. “Previous missions had tried to look at Phobos at similar wavelengths and just failed to get any signal at all,” explained Justin Deighan, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. This is the first time either of the Martian moons has been successfully observed in the ultraviolet. These asteroids formed beyond Jupiter’s orbit and are thought to be rich in water and other volatiles. In the ultraviolet, the researchers didn’t find signs of organic compounds or carbon-rich minerals, which are expected in D-type asteroids-those that look most like Deimos. Deimos, on the other hand, is covered by a fine powder called regolith, lending it a smooth look similar to our own Moon as well as neighboring Phobos. Those asteroids have a very coarse surface filled with loose boulders and rocks. Visually, Deimos doesn’t look like asteroids Ryugu or Bennu, visited by the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, respectively. The Hope probe snapped a series of images of Deimos during the flyby, capturing Mars in the background. The findings were reported at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in April. Two other instruments recorded the infrared and ultraviolet light radiating off the moon’s surface, revealing details about its composition and temperature. The craft’s visible-light camera took photos of the surface with a resolution of 10 meters per pixel. The nearest approach occurred on 10 March 2023, when it got within 103 kilometers of the moon’s surface.ĭuring the flyby, Hope mapped almost the entire surface of Deimos, capturing the first view of its farside. Flight engineers maneuvered the spacecraft to synchronize its orbit with the moon, enabling a series of flybys. Hope mapped almost the entire surface of Deimos, capturing the first view of its farside.Īfter a full Martian year of watching the planet, mission scientists took a unique opportunity to approach Deimos. To get a full view of the outer atmosphere, the satellite has a high elliptical orbit at between 20,000 and 43,000 kilometers from the planet. The Hope probe, as the Emirati spacecraft is called, arrived at Mars in February 2021 to observe variations in the Martian atmosphere over the seasons. The Viking 2 lander achieved the last close-up in 1977 while en route to Mars. It averages just 12 kilometers in diameter and orbits more than 20,000 kilometers from the surface of Mars-much farther away than most spacecraft around the planet. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday.ĭeimos is a hard target for space missions. Instead, chemical clues point to a makeup similar to Mars itself, suggesting the moon could have been born of the Red Planet. Obtained by the Emirates Mars Mission in March, the images show Deimos lacks the expected signs of an asteroidal origin. New close-up images of the outer moon, Deimos, seem to support the impact theory. Another suggests that a single larger moon formed first but got too close to Mars and disintegrated, leaving Phobos and Deimos to form from its scraps. One variation posits the moons could have coalesced directly from material lifted by the impact. Since the initial captured asteroid theory took hold, however, new ideas have emerged to explain the origin of Phobos and Deimos-mostly variations of a giant impact scenario that launched enough Martian material in orbit to form the moons. On the basis of the objects’ small, irregular shape and shade (among the darkest in the solar system), scientists have thought they could be asteroids captured by chance into Martian orbit. Lists Unordered Lists Ordered Lists Other Lists HTML Block & Inline HTML Classes HTML Id HTML Iframes HTML JavaScript HTML File Paths HTML Head HTML Layout HTML Responsive HTML Computercode HTML Semantics HTML Style Guide HTML Entities HTML Symbols HTML Emojis HTML Charset HTML URL Encode HTML vs.The origin of Mars’s moons-Phobos and Deimos-has puzzled scientists since their discovery in the 1870s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |