The two moons that orbit Mars are Phobos and Deimos . They were discovered by Asaph Hall in 1877 and are believed to be asteroids captured by the planet’s gravity well. Deimos goes around Mars a little more than every 30 hours and Phobos in less than 8 hours: observing it from the surface must be a spectacle, seeing it cross the sky at night. However, it seems that this is not going to happen forever.
Phobos has always been one of the most enigmatic satellites in the solar system. Its strange orbital behavior led Russian astrophysicist Iosif Shklovski in the late 1950s to hypothesize that it could be hollow. Another of the enigmas of this small moon is how it is possible that it supported the impact that created the Stickney crater, because in reality it should have destroyed it. However, physicists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (USA) have shown through a 3D simulation how it could happen without the collision reducing the Martian moon to rubble, and they postulate that it was due to a comet 250 m in diameter traveling at a speed of 6 km / s.
But if Phobos avoided such a cataclysm, what he will not be able to escape from is his final destination. Phobos is cursed as Terry Hurford, a NASA planetary astronomer, predicts that it will end up falling on the Martian surface within 20-40 million years.
In his reanalysis of the distribution of the numerous cracks that cross the surface of Phobos – which are caused by the gravitational tidal forces of the planet – Hurford is convinced that the beginning of the end of this small Martian moon has begun. What will happen next? Everything will depend on the internal structure of the satellite. According to Benjamin A. Black and Tushar Mittal of the University of California at Berkeley Phobos will not hit the surface intact. Most likely, the outer crust will fly off and create a ring of debris around Mars while the debris of Phobos will fall on the planet, seeding it with craters.
All of that will happen very quickly, in about a week. Unlike Saturn, whose ring is made up mainly of ice, the ring will be dark and will remain around the red planet for between 1 and 100 million years.
