yego.me
yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Moons of Mars Explained -- Phobos & Deimos MM#2

less than 1m read
·Nov 2, 2024

The moons of Mars explained. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They are really tiny. How tiny? Compared to Mars or our own moon, pretty tiny. Although, tiny is a matter of opinion. Their surface area is up close to some of the smallest states on Earth, like Luxembourg and Malta.

Although Phobos and Deimos are in no way lightweight, in reality, their gravitational pull isn't even strong enough to bring them into spherical form. So they look more like huge potatoes than moons. The most popular theory of their origin is that they were once part of the asteroid belt until Jupiter's massive gravity kicked them out of it.

So Mars could catch them. Phobos orbits Mars at an average distance of 9,400 kilometers, once every 7 and a half hours. It's on a collision course and gets 2 meters closer to Mars every year. In 50 to 100 million years, it will be either ripped to pieces by Mars' gravity and be transformed into a beautiful ring, or it will crash into Mars.

The energy released in this collision would kill everything on the small planet. So, if there are humans on Mars by then, they should build very strong bunkers. Smaller Deimos, on the other hand, is slowly escaping Mars. Eventually, it will fly off into space and leave a lonely red planet behind.

So, in a few hundred million years, Mars will be moonless and on its own. Unless, it manages to catch itself another asteroid.

English subtitles by Dan9er.

Leonard Susskind on Richard Feynman, the Holographic Principle, and Unanswered Questions in Physics
Graphing two variable inequality

More Articles

View All
The Decline in Drug Research | Breakthrough
The interesting thing about bing drugs is that the bands are supposed to reduce recreational use. We’re not sure they do. They stop people perhaps talking about it, but they don’t stop recreation. But what they do do is they stop research. We know that s…
Adding fractions with unlike denominators introduction
In this video, we’re gonna try to figure out what one-half plus one-third is equal to. And like always, I encourage you to pause this video and try to figure it out on your own. All right, now let’s work through this together, and it might be helpful to …
Have We Ever All BLINKED At The Same Time?
Has there ever been a moment in our history when no one was watching because every living human just happened to blink at the exact same time? Well, let’s see. Humans blink about once every 4 seconds, and a typical blink is about a third of a second long.…
The European Union Explained*
Where is the European Union? Obviously here somewhere, but much like the European continent itself, which has an unclear boundary, the European Union also has some fuzzy edges to it. To start, the official members of the European Union are, in decreasing…
How do QR codes work? (I built one myself to find out)
When QR codes first came out, I thought they were awful, never going to catch on. This is a flow chart from the time that really resonated with me. The problem as I saw it was that QR codes are ugly, and they mean nothing to people. I would rather just se…
Introduction to Type I and Type II errors | AP Statistics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about type 1 errors and type 2 errors, and this is in the context of significance testing. So just as a little bit of review, in order to do a significance test, we first come up with a null and an alternative…