CANADA: NASA confirmed that Mars’s moon Phobos is showing early signs of structural failure that will likely lead to the moon’s demise.
Visible grooves on Phobos are caused by gravitational tidal forces as Mars and Phobos mutually pull on one another, just as Earth and our moon pull on each other.
“We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves,” Dr. Terry Hurford, a researcher with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a press release.
Phobos, one of the Red Planet’s two moons, orbits only 3,700 miles above Mars, making it the closest planet-moon relationship of any planet in our solar system. By comparison, our moon orbits about 238,855 miles above Earth. And, while Earth’s moon is inching away from our planet, Phobos is moving closer: Mars continues to pull in its moon at a rate of about 6.6 feet per century.
