Will Mars Lose One of its Moons?

Two young earth scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, USA,

made a discovery that could fundamentally change our view on Mars.

Image by Tushar Mittal using Celestia 2001-2010, Celestia Development Team

Mars' largest moon, Phobos, is slowly falling toward the planet. But, it is not

the way you might think. According to UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow

Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal, the moon will rather

burst into millions of pieces and form a ring around the planet, like Jupiter,

Saturn, Uranus or Neptune has. Both researchers believe this phenomenon

might occur in about 20-40 million years. In a paper that appeared in

Nature Geoscience, both scientists conclude that the cohesiveness of

Phobos is not sufficient enough to resist the tidal force and that’s why lets

the moon come closer and closer to Mars. As Phobos comes closer to the

surface of Mars, its tidal force pulls even stronger on it, so that at some

point it will just shatter into millions of pieces and form a ring around the

planet made of debris. The image above shows how Mars could possibly

look like. It is still not clear whether we from earth could see the rings or

not. Most likely, Mars will only appear a little brighter than normal at the

evening sky.