The Smallest Moon of Mars May Not Be What It Seemed

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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/science/mars-deimos-moon-photos.html

By Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars, might be a chip off the old block — quite literally. That’s the conclusion drawn by scientists in the United Arab Emirates, whose Hope orbiter — also called the Emirates Mars Mission and the country’s first interplanetary spacecraft — just snapped the best views of Deimos ever taken by human spacecraft. ...Mars has two irregularly shaped moons, and neither is mighty. Phobos, the larger of the two, is about 17 miles in diameter at its widest, and orbits closer to the red planet at an altitude of about 3,700 miles. Deimos is just nine miles across on its longest side, and completes an orbit of Mars every 30 hours at an altitude of 15,000 miles. The moons’ small size and quirky dimensions led to suggestions that they may be asteroids captured by Mars long ago. Not so, say researchers analyzing data recorded by Hope, which entered orbit around Mars in February 2021. The mission, primarily intended to study the Martian atmosphere, has spent 2023 in an extended phase performing multiple flybys of Deimos. ...Hope’s three scientific instruments were able to probe the composition of Deimos. They found it was more similar to Mars, namely in the amount of carbon and organics present, than to D-type asteroids, the class of asteroids previously suggested as its origin....

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