The Hope probe, from the United Arab Emirates, took incredible pictures of the moon Deimos, the smallest natural satellite of Mars. The images were captured in March, when the spacecraft performed a flyby and was approximately 100 km from the surface of the moon; with the detailed observations obtained, scientists may be able to unravel its origins.
The ship orbits the Red Planet on a trajectory that puts it in a prime position to study Deimos. As her orbit is quite wide, the spacecraft is between 20,000 and 43,000 kilometers from the planet, managing to observe large parts of its atmosphere at once – and, as a bonus, it was even able to approach the moon.
Below, you can see some of the images captured during the flyover:
During the passage by Deimos, the Hope spacecraft managed to take pictures and took the opportunity to carry out observations in ultraviolet and infrared light, collecting data from regions never examined in such detail. With this data in hand, scientists can investigate how Deimos and Phobos, the pair of moons that orbit Mars, came to be.
“We are uncertain about the origins of both,” noted Hessa Al Matroushi, a scientist leading the mission. “An old theory is that they are captured asteroids, but there are unanswered questions about their composition,” she added, in a presentation of the results at a conference held during the European Union of Geosciences.
However, observations of the moons by Hope suggest that perhaps this explanation is not correct. The moons appear to be more Mars-like in composition than asteroids, indicating that they may have formed from the planet or parent material.
Launched in July 2020, it was only in February of the following year that Hope Mars entered Mars orbit. This is the first interplanetary mission ever launched by the country’s space agency and, originally, it was supposed to last just one Martian year (something close to two years on Earth). However, the United Arab Emirates decided to extend the mission to continue studying the planet and its moons.
Source: The National News; Via: Nature
