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Mars is a very important place, with space agencies around the world doing their best to get there and SpaceX suggesting that a colony of Mars will be built in a decade, but there are also some very interesting objects that float around March. Phobos, a tiny potato-shaped moon, has intrigued researchers for decades and some of these responses may now surface.
Determining how natural satellites find themselves orbiting a planet is a difficult task for astronomers. The task is even more difficult in the case of Phobos, which is small and almost-asteroid-like, but a new study suggests that the rock may well be a piece of Mars itself.
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The reason why the story of Phobos is so difficult to trace is its appearance. It is much darker than the surface of Mars, and the color difference – Phobos being much darker – has led many astronomers to assume that it was simply an object captured by the gravity of the planet.
This new research cycle focused on the average infrared images captured by Mars Global Explorer. Comparing the readings to similar heat analyzes performed on a meteorite supposed to be a Class D asteroid chunk (which some suspect to be Phobos), the researchers found that these results were far from similar.
"We found, at these wavelengths, that the Tagish Lake meteorite is nothing like Phobos," in fact, what best fits Phobos, or at least one of the characteristics of the spectrum , "says Tim Glotch, a Stony Brook University scientist and lead author of the study. "This leads us to think that perhaps Phobos could be a remnant of an impact that occurred at the beginning of Martian history."
If Phobos is indeed made of the same material as the surface of Mars, it would be a big step forward to the conclusion that the moon is the result of some sort of impact in the very early years of the planet. In the end, a sample of Phobos will have to be analyzed on Earth to be able to judge definitively. The Martian Moons Exploration mission of the Japanese space agency JAXA plans to do this, but it will not be launched until 2024.
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