Mars’s moon Phobos may someday turn back into a ring around the planet

By Leah Crane

NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/Univ. of Arizona

For Mars’s moon Phobos, it’s mud to mud. There’s proof that the misshapen minute moon has long passed thru a cycle of being smashed up and spreading precise into a ring round Mars sooner than coalescing precise into a staunch moon all once more.

This ring-moon cycle became once proposed in 2017, and fresh simulations by Matija Ćuk on the SETI Institute in California, and his colleagues narrate that this sort of cycle for Phobos could well even neutral trust compelled Mars’s other moon, Deimos, …