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

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

by pseudolus • 3 years ago

211 95 3 years ago

nature.com

needle0• 3 years ago

I can't be the only one who initially misread UAE as UAC.

DeathArrow• 3 years ago

You've played DOOM?

someweirdperson2• 3 years ago

The headline is probably wrong. Most likely, Deimos is a well-known moon, only second to Luna. Maybe tied with Phobos.

nailer• 3 years ago

A lot of people don’t realise this but there’s a new made by the Wolfenstein 3D people.

It has up and down AND walls can be at different angles!

You’re a space marine and fight demons.

867-5309• 3 years ago

on Windows .. as Administrator

matthewdgreen• 3 years ago

Another moon that stubbornly proves to be an actual moon, and not an ancient alien space station.

doublerabbit• 3 years ago

You sure it's not an alien space station disguised as a moon?

ChrisMarshallNY• 3 years ago

If you watched Moonfall, you learned that our own moon is actually an alien spaceship, and that only socially-maladjusted people can fix it.

the8472• 3 years ago

Martian invasion fleet disguised as a moon. https://www.project-apollo.net/mos/mos215.html

unwind• 3 years ago

Wow it's so small!! Only 12.4 km wide, that's miniscule! Earth's moon is like 3,400 km. No wonder they call it a "moonlet".

mbreese• 3 years ago

I figured it was called a moonlet because it didn’t have enough innate gravity to form a sphere shape. The pictures from the article have it looking quite bumpy.

marcodiego• 3 years ago

My favorite photo of Mars with one of its moons: https://web.archive.org/web/20150426080937/http://mentalland...

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

Next step, set up the Cape Dread port!

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/appcapedread.ph...

EDIT: To summarize a big page, Demimos is relatively close to Low Earth Orbit in delta-v terms so it makes a convenient place to top up fuel tanks with volatiles extracted from the carbonaceous before heading further outwards. Maybe.

ben_w• 3 years ago

I was thinking more along the lines of a colony ship for sale, cheap…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)

endisneigh• 3 years ago

at only 12km wide, I wonder how it would feel walking along it.

godshatter• 3 years ago

It's escape velocity is about 5.5 m/s, you might be able to sprint fast enough to float away from it. I suspect walking on it would be an exercise in tedium as you took a step and waited while you floated back down to the surface.

gs17• 3 years ago

Doom would have been a much weirder game if they had use realistic surface gravities.

simonh• 3 years ago

Falling a distance of 1 metre would take 25 seconds, and for a step 10cm high it would take 8 seconds.

If you exerted the same force to lift your body upwards as you'd need on earth to rise by 5cm, as in going on tip-toe, you'd jump about 1.5 metres. It would take you well over a minute to land again.

ansible2• 3 years ago

I suspect walking on it would be an exercise in tedium as you took a step and waited while you floated back down to the surface.

With a surface gravity of 0.003 m/s, even slight twitches by an astronaut would be enough to launch off the surface.

The flip side of that is a sample-return mission (as with OSIRIS-REx) could work with a similar mechanism and manuvering. Though obviously more delta-V is required to get into and get out of Mars orbit.

mcv7• 3 years ago

I would expect astronauts landing on Deimos would wear some sort of jet pack that could push them back to the surface in case they accidentally float a bit too far away from it.

Jun8• 3 years ago

Deimos looks so small w.r.t. Mars! Would Martians be able to enjoy solar eclipses? Answer : https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/34953/is-earth...

idlewords5• 3 years ago

A fun Deimos fact is that there exist stable prograde orbits around it, while there are no such orbits around its bigger brother Phobos. Because Phobos orbits closer to Mars, its gravitational sphere of influence is smaller than its physical size.

A nice paper on the different ways of orbiting the Martian moons and their trade-offs:

https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2012-5067

franky47• 3 years ago

Does that also mean you can't land on Phobos (and stay on the "ground" untethered)?

rovingnothing29• 3 years ago

So Phobos is space Australia.

idlewords5• 3 years ago

You can land on Phobos just fine, and unlike on Deimos there's no danger of accidentally jumping off into space (Phobos escape velocity is about 41 km/h). All the 'sphere of influence' stuff means is that orbits are too perturbed by unevenness in the Martian gravitational field and can't stay stable.

Deimos is much smaller, but because it's further from Mars there is a region right above the surface (below 700 meters or so) where you could have stable prograde orbits.

caf• 3 years ago

If it were close enough that Mars pulling you away from Phobos was strong than Phobos pulling you towards it, Phobos also couldn't hold itself together - it would crumble into a ring.

mcv7• 3 years ago

If we're sharing fun facts: apparently it takes the same amount of delta-V to travel to the surface of Deimos as it does to the surface of the Moon. Because of the Moon's much larger gravity.

There have been people playing with the possibility of using it as a refuelling station, because it's thought to contain a lot of water.

JKCalhoun• 3 years ago

Somewhere I read (was it Clarke?, Asimov? ... who knows) that you could pitch a baseball on the surface of Deimos, wait some number of hours (minutes?) and it would have orbited and returned from the opposite direction, you could then hit the ball with a bat and some time later catch it on the re-orbit and declare yourself out.

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

Escape velocity is just around 5 m/2 so don't pitch it too fast or it won't come back! Even a Little League pitcher should be able to throw a ball at 20 m/s or so.

euroderf2• 3 years ago

It should be possible to jump up off the surface at this speed too eh

AnimalMuppet2• 3 years ago

Pretty sure I can still do 100 m in less than 20 seconds, so...

(Except, as others have said, I wouldn't have the traction to accelerate.)

dmoy• 3 years ago

I think it was Carl Sagan and Phobos. Not Deimos.

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

This is interesting. From what I understand Russia has launched multiple probes to the Martian moons and they all have failed. Amazingly, they still are planning at some point in the near future to launch the same Soviet-era designed probe again.

euroderf2• 3 years ago

Mars was eating US probes too. If you go thru archives you'll find cartoons of Mars eating everything thrown at it.

rebolek• 3 years ago

And by near future they mean when we'll have nuclear fusion, which will be in near future too. I've been reading about their plans for 30+ years.

pdpi• 3 years ago

It's sort of amusing to see Deimos described as "little-known". I grew up playing Doom, so I learned about Mars's moons Phobos and Deimos way earlier than I did any of the other, better known moons in the solar system.

ammanley• 3 years ago

You got some strangely heated responses to this, but I just wanted to say I share your boat. Its nice to see real pics as an adult now of it all. Also, my trip to Phobos and Deimos was, you could say, hellish. 11/10, would rip and tear again.

dllthomas• 3 years ago

It's a nice boat.

kitsunesoba• 3 years ago

I think the first I heard of it was in another game, Ambrosia Software's top-down scroller Deimos Rising, which came bundled with my Pixar lamp iMac back in the early 2000s.

EamonnMR3• 3 years ago

The soundtrack to that game really stuck with me, as it was installed on the eMacs in our classroom so we played it during indoor recess. Since the addons page is long gone, I threw the soundtrack up on the internet archive.[1] Ben Spees, who did the Soundtrack went on to found the math rock band Mercury Tree.[2]

I mostly remember Ambrosia for the Escape Velocity series though, especially Nova.

1: https://archive.org/details/deimos_rising_soundtrack

2: https://themercurytree.bandcamp.com/

hammyhavoc• 3 years ago

I'm a Zone of the Enders nerd, so know about it through that too.

sjrd• 3 years ago

Ah ah, similar experience here as well, though through the board game Terraforming Mars.

mcv7• 3 years ago

According to the boardgame High Frontier, Deimos contains a lot of water, and yet the Deimos Down card in Terraforming Mars does not place an ocean tile. So which is it? Why are different boardgames so inconsistent about Deimos?

EamonnMR3• 3 years ago

In Marathon it was converted into the titular generation ship and launched towards Tau Ceti. But I suppose you could call Marathon little known too...

temp0826• 3 years ago

This was my first thought too as I grew up with the game.

On the subject, for a little blast from the past...the Marathon's Story website is still around-

https://marathon.bungie.org/story/

28 years old, a little noteworthy!

bookofjoe2• 3 years ago

The first person to set foot on Deimos is alive right now (but most likely NOT reading this).

anigbrowl2• 3 years ago

Is there any reason to try to land on such a small body, whose gravity is probably negligible?

bookofjoe2• 3 years ago

Because it's there

hooverd• 3 years ago

Alright, time to hollow that bad boy out and send it to Tau Ceti.

mikeInAlaska• 3 years ago

I remember sitting on my front deck with my telescope watching Mars for a couple hours. The local atmosphere settled and the planetary features and colors were amazing. After a while I kept noticing a speck appearing and disappearing off the edge of Mars. After an hour it had definitely moved substantially. I ran in and checked my observatory software and it was Deimos !! Imagine that, a 7.7 mile diameter object seen visually from 43 million miles away.

rendall• 3 years ago

Exploring the moons of Mars is all fun and games until you invent teleportation and unleash demons from another dimension!

PicassoCTs• 3 years ago

Was it Deimos or Phobos, which could be decelerated to crash into mars with todays tech?

henriquez• 3 years ago

Phobos is already on a doomed orbit, at only 10,000km above the surface it is very low and slightly decaying all the time. Eventually Phobos will be ripped apart by tidal forces in Mars’ atmosphere and (at least partially) crash into the planet.

h2odragon• 3 years ago

"eventually" the sun will expand and make the rest of mars valuable beachfront property again.

Time to start selling real estate there. Get in before the ground floor, imagine the profits! All the cool pipples are doing it, you wouldn't want to miss out.

outworlder2• 3 years ago

I just checked and the Roche Limit is 5,470km for Phobos.

Will still take a few million years.

keybuk• 3 years ago

We don't use that moon anyway

mcv7• 3 years ago

In the boardgame Terraforming Mars, you can do that with Deimos. In the game, it would increase the temperature of Mars by a couple of degrees and destroy some of an opponent's plants.

dustfinger• 3 years ago

Both my kids can't stop laughing because they think Deimos looks like a person's bottom - LOL!

geuis3• 3 years ago

Has anyone found a high res version of this image of Deimos against Mars in the background? https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-023-01...

Checked the mission site but they haven't updated their images page in quite a while.

mzs• 3 years ago

  WEBP:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/168237...

  JPG:

https://cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/estada...

geuis3• 3 years ago

You are amazing and I hope you have a great day!

geuis3• 3 years ago

Here's the scientific findings video from 2 days ago from the European Geosciences Union conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtpGR-D7aTo

reassembled• 3 years ago

Is there anything special about the camera focusing tech required to capture that image of Deimos? It looks extremely well focused.

kjs3• 3 years ago

This is a real credit to the UAE scientists and engineers. Getting to Mars and being able to do something useful has historically been a very tough problem.

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

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