CANADA: The Planetary Society has suggested sending humans to Phobos first, before sending them to the surface of the Red Planet.
Mars will one day have its own ring – and become a smaller version of Saturn, say scientists.
None of the inner planets has a ring. A few studies estimate that during planet formation, 20-30 percent of planets acquire moons moving inward and destined for destruction, though they would have long since disappeared. If it’s beyond that point of equilibrium, it will slowly drift away. Earth’s moon, in contrast, is more than 363,000 kilometers (239,000 miles) from our planet.
That will be the ultimate fate of Phobos, as astronomers have known for decades.
To predict Phobos end, Black and his colleague Tushar Mittal, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, examined its structure and found the moon is only slightly denser than gravel or wet sand. This is because Phobos is highly fractured, with lots of pores and rubble.
Such objects aren’t especially strong, the study authors wrote.
The researchers noted that Phobos has a low density, suggesting it’s very porous. “The orbit of Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moonlets, is gradually spiralling inwards towards Mars and the moon is experiencing increasing tidal stresses”. That impact undermined the moon’s integrity even further.
To determine the “rock mass strength” of Phobos, Black and Mittal used a model employed by engineers who work on massive underground construction projects on Earth.
Recent research claims that Mars’ moon Phobos will disintegrate in approximately 20 million years and make it a ringed planet. “But because that material will be spread over a smaller ring area, we predict that the initial density of a ring formed from the breakup of Phobos could rival or exceed the density of Saturn’s rings”. The Martian ring will last for at least 1 million years – and perhaps for as long as 100 million years, according to the study.
