First up-close images of Mars's little-known moon Deimos

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01422-1

24 April 2023

First up-close images of Mars’s little-known moon Deimos

Images from the UAE’s Hope mission suggest that the moonlet’s composition is similar to that of the red planet’s surface.

Davide Castelvecchi



The moonlet Deimos is made of the same type of material as Mars, the latest observations suggest.Credit: Emirates Mars Mission

The United Arab Emirates’ space probe Hope has taken the first high-resolution images of the farside of Mars’s moonlet Deimos. The observations add weight to the theory that Deimos formed together with Mars, rather than as an asteroid that was captured in the planet’s orbit, mission scientists say.

Hope, formally known as the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM), performed a fly-by — the first of many — on 10 March. EMM science lead Hessa Al Matroushi recalls the excitement when the first images streamed in, looking down at the 12.4-kilometre-wide moonlet. “Mars was in the background — and that was just mind blowing, honestly,” says Al Matroushi, who is at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She reported the results at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna on 24 April.

Like Earth’s Moon, Deimos is tidally locked to its planet, meaning that any observations from a low Mars orbit or the planet’s surface are always of the same side of the moonlet.

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[SCantiGOP]

1. Looks like it is made out of PlayDoh