Those results suggest the Deimos’s composition more closely matches Mars than that of a class of asteroids that was previously flagged as the likely raw material for Deimos and Phobos alike: D-type asteroids in the outer asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft returned some of the best data and images of Deimos yet from as low as 100 kilometers above the moon’s surface. announced that its orbiter, Hope, had studied the smaller of Mars’s two moons, Deimos. “There’s room to be surprised, but I think we’re going to figure it out,” says Jemma Davidson of Arizona State University. The mission will build on exciting new results from a United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) orbiter at Mars that suggest a planetary origin for the two moons. A Japanese spacecraft launching next year will attempt to bring samples back from Phobos. It remains unclear which of these two formation routes holds true for Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos-but we may soon have an answer. Some moons in the solar system, such as several of Jupiter’s smaller satellites, appear to be captured asteroids. We know that Earth’s moon was likely formed from a giant impact on our planet about 4.5 billion years ago. Where did the moons of Mars come from? That’s a question scientists still can’t answer.
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