Walter Myers/Science photo library
Next to the earth, Mars can be the most studied world in our solar system, it currently houses a fleet of orbiters, Landers and Rovers. But above the red sands where the rovers travel, a strange moon rises twice a day. And despite all the scrutiny that Mars receives, this moon, phobos, remains wrapped in mystery.
Phobos and her smallest neighboring moon, Deimos, both discovered in 1877, are two of the most disconcerting worlds in the Solar System. “They are the only objects at this stage, in the Solar System, for which we have no idea what they are,” he says Pascal Lee at the Seti Institute in California. “We know what other moons are. We know asteroids and comets. Phobos and Deimos? I have no idea “.
Martian moons can be captured asteroids, or they could have formed from the same primordial planet disc as Mars. Perhaps they were forged from a burning cataclysm as the collision that elaborated the moon of the earth. Or maybe its history of origin is something completely different. “What the hell are they?” asking Abigail Fraeman in the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “I think this is one of the great mysteries of planetary science.”
Now, there is hope that we can finally solve that puzzle, thanks to a new mission to Phobos that is in process. Doing this would offer more than a satisfactory response: it could also open a new window in the history of the internal solar system, and perhaps point to the source of the basic components of life on earth.
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