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.

More Articles

View All
The Video Chat That Existed In The 1870s | How Sci-fi Inspired Science
You hear your phone. You look down, and what do you see? Incoming video call. After you hit the client, think about how commonplace video chats have become. For a long time, the idea of seeing someone from across the world was only in science fiction. So,…
Overview of the Middle Ages | World History | Khan Academy
Growing up, we all have impressions of the Middle Ages. We read about knights in shining armor, castles with moats, and towers. But when were the Middle Ages? The simple answer: the Middle Ages in Europe are the roughly 1,000 years from the fall of the Ro…
Watch Adorable Babies Go on a Hilarious High-Altitude Adventure | Short Film Showcase
Shelby was doing stuff that no one else was even trying, and a lot of people didn’t even realize he was a baby in the late 2016’s. Like everything had already been done, you know? At that point, the scene shifted to the sub six Monon old group. Tons of ta…
Subject and object pronouns | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy
All right, so grammarians, I want to talk to you about the difference between subject and object pronouns. But before we do that, let’s start off with a little primer on what subjects and objects actually are—um, just generally, for our grammatical purpos…
Conservation of momentum | Physics | Khan Academy
When we shoot a cannon, not only does the ball go forward, but the cannon itself goes backward. This means when we shot it, the ball gained a forward momentum, and the cannon itself also gained a backward momentum. The big question is: if we know what the…
Underestimating the problem of induction
I’m going to talk about two of the biggest problems I can see with the presupposition lists. Attempts to establish a rational basis for inductive reasoning. Hum’s writing on inductive inference draws our attention to the fact that inductive inferences are…