From the Vault: Phobos and Deimos, Part 2

moons of Mars, Phobos and Demos. Now, in the last episode, we talked a bit about the mythology behind the moons of Mars, the companions and sons of the war god Aries the Roman Mars, the god of War, and we talked about how the names of these came to be applied to the moons of Mars, these two small objects that were discovered in the late nineteenth century. We talked about that discovery story. We talked about some of the basic properties of Phobos and Demos and why there is

some question about what their origin was. We're gonna get into more detail about that today. And we ended up talking about a bizarre conspiracy theory about an interesting surface feature of Phobos that really had nothing to it. But the surface feature, known as the Phobos Monolith, is inherently very interesting. Yeah, and so in this episode, we're gonna we're gonna cover more interesting stuff about Phobos and demos, uh,

stuff about the history of its exploration. We'll get into another idea that conspiracy theorists seem to really like concerning one of the two moons. There'll be a dash of mythology here and there, but it should be a fun ride, now, Robin. The last episode, we were talking about how close the moon Phobos is to Mars. It is the loosest moon to its host planet in the entire Solar System. Uh, it's so close. I think it's a it's a matter

of you know, just like several thousand kilometers. It's a distance that is a little bit longer than the driving distance between Miami and Vancouver, as we talked about the last time. So you know, if you if there were a road between them, you could drive it in two or three days. And that's incredibly close for a moon

to uh to orbit its host planet. But I found Another point of comparison that we didn't make in the last episode that I thought was absolutely astounding, and it's that the moon Phobos orbits so close to the surface of Mars that if you are standing near the polar regions of Mars, sometimes you can't see the Moon even when it's on the same side of the planet as you, because it's blocked by the horizon. It's orbiting down near the equator and you can't see it over the curvature

of Mars itself. That that's unbelievable. Yeah, that is that is pretty amazing. And of course, as we discussed, it's getting closer to Mars and will eventually, uh you know, millions and millions of years in the future, will actually crash into Mars or break up in orbit and become a new ring around the planet. Yeah, they're gonna tussle. Yeah.

But one of the things we also alluded to in the last episode is that these two moons, Phobos and Demos, have extremely weird properties that really raise questions about where they come from in the first place. And you can ask this about moons all throughout the Solar System, like there is some question about where the moon of Earth

came from those. There's a there's a pretty strong leading theory that is the giant impact hypothesis, the idea that early during the formation of Earth, Earth was hit by a planetestimal or you know, a Mars sized object roughly, and that giant impact created a bunch of debris and eventually the what was left over coalesced into the Earth

and then the Moon in orbit around the Earth. Indeed, uh, certain properties of these moons as well discussed here, tend to lend themselves more to one interpretation, and other properties if you focus on those, lend towards another interpretation, which leads to just a fair amount of you know, continued confusion, but also intense fascination. Yeah. There's an article about this that we were both reading that kind of sums up

some of the debate pretty nicely. It was published in The New York Times by Robin George Andrews in July, called why the super weird Moons of Mars Fascinates Scientists, and it briefly goes over some of the arguments either way is now um. One of the things that points out is that if you're just to look at the what the moons appear to be made of you know, they're they're sort of physical characteristics in and of themselves.

They look a lot like captured asteroids, asteroids that at some point would have been bumped off course and then caught in the gravity well of Mars, so that they ended up just orbiting Mars permanently. Yeah, the the the asteroid capture hypothesis, which which which is a popular one, but it doesn't quite explain everything right now in its favor. One of the main things that has going for it is that the material that the Martian moons are made of looks a lot like asteroid type material. Yeah, so

that they they look like asteroids. They seem to be composed of the same material as asteroids, And yeah, they would have just ended up too close to mars gravitational pull and would have been simply orbitally dominated by the planet Mars. The god of War says, you too, you you shattered wrecks. You are now my son's come with me, right into battle with me. It's like in the cop

movie when you commandeer the vehicle. You know, I'm commandeering this vehicle, or James Bond gets into somebody's car and drives off with it, or I guess it would be more like tying a car to you and making it swing around you. I guess that analogy isn't that great, But yeah, it's it's saying you're coming with me now, right. But the other interesting thing is that they have that

kind of throws this off. Is they have near equatorial orbits, and Is Andrews points out in this article this suggests that they coalesced from a disc of debris that danced around a very young Mars. So it basically it's just all too neat and tidy surely to be an asteroid capture. So in other words, like, okay, if there, if it's asteroid capture, these are like wildcats. But if they're wildcats, why are they behaving like orbital house cats? So so

that's that's part of the big confusion here. Yeah, so you've got some creepy space yukon golds that look like they're made of roughly asteroid stuff. But the way they orbit Mars, it's a couple of things actually that their orbits are near equatorial, meaning that they orbit basically, you know, not exactly but pretty close to around the equator line of Mars. You know, in between polls. And then the other part is that their orbits are nearly perfectly circular.

And this is just not what you would expect to see with a captured asteroid. If an asteroid came in that was originally orbiting the Sun at a different speed and then it just got stuck in the gravity well of Mars, what you would probably expect to see is that its orbit would be more irregular, some more stretched out, right. You know, that's often when something gets captured by an object and it was originally on its own trajectory, it tends to have a more stretched out oval type orbit.

But then the other thing is you would expect its orbit to be tilted at a steeper angle rather than neatly orbiting pretty close to its equatorial line. And then there's one more factor that I think is worth considering. This is actually cited in that article in The New York Times by Robin George Andrews. And Andrews quotes a Japanese scientist named Tomohiro Usui who points out that also

Mars gravity is pretty weak. I mean, you know, you can capture an asteroid, but Tamohiro Sui points out that Mars has like a tenth of Earth's mass, So it's kind of improbable that it would be able to capture two asteroids that are traveling by at orbital speeds, you know, speeds of orbiting the Sun. So it just seems kind of unlikely as an origin story for them, and their orbits really don't seem to match what you would expect

from from asteroid capture. Now, there is another hypothesis that would make some sense, which is that what if the moons of Mars were formed from a debris disc that was kicked up into orbit around Mars after a colossal impact. So not exactly the same as but but similar to one of the leading ideas about where the Earth's moon

comes from. There's a giant impact on Mars at some point, and that shoots all this stuff in to space around Mars, which gradually coalesces into a disc that's in orbit around Mars, and then that disc gravitationally coalesces into solid objects, these two moons. Now there's some reasons for doubting that as well. I mean, one idea offered in this article is that demos is orbit is maybe a little too far out to be explained that way, but that could possibly be overcome.

One paper I was looking at that supports the idea of a giant impact is The original source of Phobos and Demos was published in Nature Geoscience by Pascal Rosenblatt at all and it's called accretion of Phobos and Demos in an extended debris disc stirred by transient moons um and so that they write in their abstract that quote. Here we use numerical simulations to suggest that Phobos and Demos accreeded from the outer portion of a debris disc

formed after a giant impact on Mars. In our mulations, larger moons form from material in the denser inner disc and migrate outwards due to gravitational interactions with the disc. The resulting orbital resonances spread outwards and gathered dispersed outer disc debris, facilitating accretion into two satellites of sizes similar to Phobos and Demos. The larger inner moons fall back to Mars after about five million years due to the title poll of the planet, after which the two outer

satellites evolve into Phobos and Demos like orbits. The proposed scenario can explain why Mars has two small satellites instead of one large moon. Our model predicts that Phobos and Demos are composed of a mixture of material from Mars and the impact or so. Again, this would be kind of similar to the Earth's moon origin story. There's a

giant impact on Mars long long ago. It spits out all this debris into orbit around Mars that forms into multiple moons at different orbital distances, and interactions between those eventually cause inner moons to be destroyed spiraling into Mars as Phobos will one day do, and then UH, and then these other objects to coalesce into the current orbits that we see for Phobos and Demos. So that's one plausible possibility they've put together. Yeah, and this satisfies some

of the mysteries that we discussed earlier. How can it be uh and have the qualities of an asteroid capture but also have the qualities of something that formed out of a disk around Mars. Now we've mentioned that Phobos as its spirals into Mars will probably break apart. I mean, we mentioned a couple options. It could just crash into Mars.

More of the sources that I was reading seemed to suggest that the more likely option is that as it spirals into Mars, it will be sort of ripped apart by tidal forces and it will break up and become rings in orbit around Mars. But really interesting question that I came across in another study in Nature Geoscience, this one published in This is the question of what if this future scenario where Phobos breaks up in orbit around Mars and becomes rings, what if that has already happened.

Very interesting origin hypothesis for for these two moons. So this is by Andrew J. Hessel Brock and David A. Minton. Again, that's Nature Geoscience in seen called an ongoing satellite ring cycle of Mars and the origins of Phobos and Demos. Now this uh. This explanation has a similar beginning as the last one, but some of the details are different.

Again to read from their abstract, the Martian moons Phobos and Demos may have acreated from a ring of impact debris, but explaining their origin from a single giant impact has proven difficult. One clue may lie in the orbit of Phobos that is slowly decaying as the satellite undergoes tidal interactions with Mars. In about seventy million years, Phobos is predicted to reach the location of title, breakup and break

apart to form a new ring around the planet. Here, we use numerical simulations to suggest that the resulting ring will viscously spread to eventually deposit about eight percent of debris onto Mars. The remaining twenty of debris will accrete into a new generation of satellites. Furthermore, we propose that

this process has occurred repeatedly throughout Martian history. In our simulations, beginning with a large satellite formed after giant impact with early Mars, we find that between three and seven ring satellite cycles over the past four point three billion years can explain Phobos and Demos as they are observed today. Such a scenario implies the deposition of significant ring material

onto Mars during each cycle. We hypothesize that some anomalous sedimentary deposits observed on Mars maybe linked to these periodic episodes of ring deposition. So Phobos or the ancestor of Phobos could have been once much larger, maybe twenty times more massive. But then there's this pattern that repeats over time, almost like you know, the mythological cycle of history, where there's orbital decay. It's it's going closer and closer down

into Mars. It shatters from tidal forces. It's you know, turned, It splits apart into a million pieces, forms a ring around Mars. The pieces of the ring then coalesce into a moon, and then repeat with the moon getting smaller

every cycle. I love this because if you if you take it and then apply it to the mythological model that we've been discussing here, you have Mars, who is you know, actually more the the you know, we can would think more of the Greek war god aries representing the worst of war, just the the bloodshed and the screams. Just this awful deity, the god of the screams of the dying. Yeah, yeah, the god of the screams of

the dying. And so it makes sense that his two loyal sons who are destined to rebel against him have always rebelled against him, Like there's a cycle of them rebelling against the Almighty Fad. They're here being destroyed, breaking up, but then he reforms them. You know, it's like they're resurrected to continue to serve them as these kind of misshapen wraiths. Oh man, Yeah, I love that. Another way to think about it is if you're talking about a

god of war. I mean, this is the process of attrition, right, slowly wearing down your enemy's forces over time. Yeah. Yeah, they keep coming back, but each time weaker and weaker. Now, like many things in space science, this is one of these great fascinating open questions that really could uh we could really have a better chance of solving if we

were to have more physical data to work with. And so this is one of the many reasons that there have been all these proposed missions to the moons of Mars, and including that, there's a there's an upcoming mission that we'll talk about in a bit from the Japanese Space Agency from Jackson that is planning to go to the moons of Mars in I think it's supposed to launch in twenty four and hopefully arrive in five. But there we could learn more the composition of these moons, which

could maybe tell us more about their history. But to come back to that New York Times article we were talking about, Uh, there's a part of it which says, quote, although made of ancient matter, the phobos we see today may have been assembled just two hundred million years ago. If it were confirmed that Phobos is a haphazardly clumped together mass, it would be a revelation suggesting planets with

rings are the norm for our Solar system. And I had to think about that for a second, and then I realized, like, oh, yeah, okay, So if it's normal for Mars to have a ring and we just happened to be observing it during one of its you know, interring periods, one of its ringless periods, that would mean the majority of planets in our Solar system have rings. Jupiter as rings, Saturn has huge rings, uh Uranus has rings. So you'd realize that rings are the standard and a

planet without rings is actually weirder. Yeah, I guess It's kind of like thinking about cities, right. Um Imagine you know most cities have some sort of sprawling suburbs, but maybe you have a city that doesn't really have suburbs, but just has like a a centralized satellite uh town outside of it, maybe to such satellite towns. Um that if that was the main thing you saw, you might think, oh, this is just how it works, this is how cities are come together. Though, one thing I should point out

from that article that they quote. Again, the Japanese researcher tell me Hero sue who says that you know, this that we were just talking about could possibly be true of Phobos, but at the same time not for Demos. It's possible that they you know, that they have these different origins, that they're not exactly the same thing. So

Demos could be much older than Phobos potentially. Uh Suey says that Demos could be three point five billion years old, whereas it's it's possible that Phobos is much much younger, just like two million years old. But again it's one of those things that it'll be hard to know for sure until we send something there and maybe even bring part of it back. I'm really need to get weird. Do you want to talk about some weird historical hypotheses

about photos? Yeah, concerning the idea of a hollow Phobos. Now, one thing I want to stress here is again we'd love to have physical evidence, physical material to look at regarding Phobos and Demos, but we don't yet. Hopefully in the future, but we don't have it now. What we have are, in addition to various other readings, we have visual images taken via fly bys and and and Mars missions, But there was a time where we didn't have those

additional um images. So I want to go back to the late nineteen fifties and ultimately to the decades preceding that, and the work of Russian astrophysicist, uh Joseph Shklovsky, who hypothesized that Phobos might be hollow and even more to the point, might be an artificial structure. Oh yeah, now you also Shaklovsky was born nineteen sixteen died nine five.

He was a Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist. And we've actually mentioned him on the show before because he co wrote and he had for the main credited author on intelligent Life in the Universe with Carl Sagan in nineteen sixty six. I believe we discussed it in our Look at Ancient Astronaut hypothesis, which uh, you know, the basics of which

they went into in this book. Uh in a in a way, this this book was was kind of pivotal to the whole Ancient Aliens movement, even though I have to stress the Chaklovsky and Sagan they discussed it rather uh you know, very in a very grounded nature very scientifically. Um. And it's other authors who really have would run wild with it and um and just you know, go off

the speculative deep end with it. You know, there's something I noticed in the in the responsible science journalism of today that is a kind of automatic, reactive uh opposition to the subject of like aliens or evidence for aliens.

And and I get it right, because if you're covering space, if you're covering astronomy, if you're covering space missions, you know, in anything having to do with space, one of the things you're going to be dealing with most often is people irresponsibly taking some piece of evidence that in no way really indicates evidence of alien life and saying it's aliens, and that they're just going to be doing that over and over again, and then you just end up having

to spend your career writing article after article of like, no, this rock on Mars is not an alien. There's no

reason you have to conclude that. You know, natural wind erosion can cause features that look strange like this, here's how, And then you can end up explaining interesting things about natural science about like how wind erosion can cause something to look sculpted or designed in a certain way or you you know, you end up saying like, no, we we don't have any reason to conclude yet that the signal coming from this star, even though it's like repeating,

is an alien. And then you can explain stuff about pulsars and how they work and what we know about them, and that's all good stuff. But I think because there is such a tendency for for hoax hype people and for the public generally to get over excited about something that's mysterious and say therefore it's aliens, you can start getting opposed to even playing with the idea of aliens, right. It starts to become like subject matter that's almost like

inherently revolting to you. Does that make any sense? And I'm very much like I I very much respect all the skeptical work, you know, and we do that too, Like we we end up having to say, like, no, there's no reason to conclude this is aliens. Nothing we have ever discovered in space is definitely aliens. There's no reason to think that there's never even really been a

strong piece of evidence for aliens that we've come across. Uh. I think there's no reason at all to go from there to say, so they're for like, don't play around with the idea of aliens, Like what would what would be evidence if we were defined it? Yeah, I mean it's kind of like with the Muamua. You know, I think there's gonna be there're gonna be people out there who are just always going to be convinced that was

a spaceship. It wasn't It was not a spaceship, right, But you know, certainly the spaceship interpretation is one that is you know, way weird, way like easier to fathom because it's so uh, it's so based in science fiction. You know, you don't need a breakdown a discussion of like why this thing was ejected from from some distant uh interstellar locale, you know. Um, And yeah, it's just

more exciting. But to a certain extent, any coverage of Mumu will always involve having to to really remind everybody that there is there's there's no strong evidence that it was a spaceship, that it was not a spaceship, but let's explore these these also these other fascinating ideas and

hypotheses concerning its origin and its nature. Sure, So, I mean I feel very attracted kind of the Carl Sagan outlook, never saying like, oh, yeah, it's aliens when you see something you don't understand, but also feeling fully free to speculate about the idea of aliens because it's an interesting subject.

I mean, it's fun to think about and and consider what the real scientific implications of the existence of aliens would be, even though you're always going to try to remain skeptical and grounded and not interpret every new piece of information about the universe that you can't currently explain as an artifact of an alien civilization, right right, And in the second was great with this, you know, he was always open to exploring those big questions and those

those those um, you know, the more radical questions, but doing so in a balanced way. We're saying, well, okay, let's let's talk about it. Yes, it could you know, aliens certainly could exist, They could have visited the Earth. There could be evidence of it in the historical record. But what would that look like, what specifically would we be looking for? Um? But that is a far hell fear approach in my opinion. Yeah, And for me, I think it's just like important to just always emphasize the

lines between you know, factual reporting and intellectual play. Yes. Now, interestingly enough, in in this book in question here Sholowsky and say again, they describe Phobos and Demos as quote, the chariot horses of the god of war um. And I'm unclear on where that comes from exactly than being horses as opposed to or in addition to, being the sons of Arias. But I think it still checks out, you know, whether their war horses or or sons, that they're kind of treated like war horses. Yeah, I mean

areas could have had some horse sons that would make sense. Yeah, Yeah, I think so. Another bit that they note in the book, and I do want to continue to drive on this is the nineteen sixty six book um quote. Thus, if we neglect the artificial satellites of Earth, Phobos is the only known moon in the Solar System with a period of revolution about its planet, which is less than the

period of rotation of the planet itself. Yeah. So it takes Earth's moon roughly a month to orbit the Earth, right, Uh, it takes less than a day for Phobos two less than a Martian day for Phobos to orbit Mars. I think it orbits like three points something times every Martian day, and by the very nature Martian day is one rotation, so it's kind of it's easy to miss that that that point. So I like the way that it really

drove that home here. So if you're you're clocking in at work for your your Martian work day, oh, there goes Phobos, and then maybe you could look at Phobos again to know when it's time to go home. Yeah. Now, if it wasn't already obvious from the association with Sagan, I want to be clear that Shaklovsky was no quack. In fact, there's a crater on Phobos named for him, Shaklovsky Crater. But he was. He was understandably intrigued and confused by the Martian moons for decades for the reasons

that we've already stated. Um. Sagan in nineteen six described alas these ideas concerning uh, the idea of a hollow Phobos as quote uh the only serious extant argument supporting intelligent life on Mars now to now. Certainly, additional information eventually discredited this notion, um. But it's interesting to look at how he got there. And the book with Sagan

contains a fair amount of of math and technical information. Uh, it's not it's not you know, certainly not a technical paper, but it's certainly not the wide audience work of science communication that we often associate with with Sagan Solo books and articles to come. But they they break down this idea in a great deal again based on data from nineteen sixty six and before so Schklovsky's idea of a hollow Phobos and then eventually tying that to speculation about

alien life. This is something that is no longer an option given what we know about Phobos today, But we're exploring this as a historical curiosity of a hypothesis. Yes, yes, So here's the here's one of the main points here. I'm going to read from from the article and uh, and I should mention as well that in these some of these quotes, um, they'll be using I, and I think we're very much that I is referring to Shakoski quote. But how can a natural satellite have such a low density.

The material of which it is made must have a certain amount of rigidity, so that cohesive forces will be stronger than the gravitational tide forces of Mars, which will tend to disrupt the satellite. Such rigidity would ordinarily exclude densities below about zero point one Graham's per centimeter to the negative third power. Thus, only one possibility remains. Could Phobos be indeed rigid on the outside but hollow on

the inside. A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object. Therefore, we are led to the possibility that Phobos and possibly Demos as well, maybe artificial satellites of Mars. And if so quote they would be artificial satellites on a scale al surpassing the fondest dreams of contemporary rocket engineers. Now again, this hypothesis is no longer really viable given the evidence that we have available to us today. But what what

a wild and wonderful idea? Yeah and uh, And Chicolosky continues to to to back this up and make some arguments around it, So I'm gonna roll through some of them here. First of all, he says, this idea might seem fantastic at first glance, but it demands serious consideration because a technologically advanced civilization would certainly be capable of manufacturing and launching such an advanced satellite. And if Mars

did not have any natural moons. The establishment of artificial moons would be a greatly important endeavor to any native civilization, or presumably, and this is just my reading of it, any civilization that took a strong interest in the planet. Further More, Shaklovsky says it it would be much easier for a Martian presence to launch a satellite h than for you know, earthlings to launch the satellite due to the reduced Martian gravity, less work is required to get

something into orbit. And also quote, conceivably, the capture and hollowing of a small asteroid might be technically more feasible than the construction in orbit of an artificial satellite with material brought from the surface. In our future, uh, he says, we too might construct such artificial satellites, and if we

pass on into extinction, well, those satellites might remain. And if so, quote, we cannot reasonably assess these possibilities, but it does seem conceivable that the lifetime of our artificial satellites may exceed the lifetime of our civilization. These satellites would then remain as unique and striking monuments to a vanished species which had once flourished on the planet. Earth.

So hypothetically, if Mars had once harbored advanced life forms and they developed an advance enough civilization, they might have established such artificial satellites have some hundreds of millions of years ago. So again, to be very clear, it is not currently the case that there is evidence to that points strongly to an artificial origin for these moons, though of course all the interesting mysteries about their natural origins remain.

But to add to the beauty of this idea, uh, there's another fact about Phobos I wanted to add, which is that it is thought to have a a very thick layer of powdery regulars all around the outside of it, So it has, uh, it's it's often thought to be

very deep. I've read estimates that it's like a hundred meters deep, so it's like, you know, over three hundred feet deep of this powdery dusty material, this regulars on the outside of it, which which gives the possibility that if in this alternate universe scenario where these moons were artificial creations of ancient technology, you could literally maybe uncover surface features of them indicating artificial origin by dusting, by moving the dust away, you know, like like the movie

scene where you wipe the sand off of a sign and see the writing on it. Yeah, blow the dust off of the the artifact and determine what it is, except I guess would be a hundred meters of dust. So that be that's that's mega dust. Now. You know, we were talking about the difference between, you know, coming up with a controversial hypothesis versus just running wild with

the radical ideas. And it seems it seems like Shaklovsky was mindful of this as well, because he points out that that there are stronger and less favorable versions of this kind of line of thinking. He points out that Soviet researcher and someone who's who would later come to be known as the father of Russian ufo ology, Felix Ziegel, had an even more extreme notion. Uh, perhaps Phobos and demos. Zigel argued, perhaps they weren't discovered by the astronomer Herschel

during the favorable Martian opposition. That means, you know, the closeness of Mars to Earth and therefore it's increased um visibility via telescope. Perhaps Herschel didn't discover these moons in eighteen sixty two and instead they were discovered by this by a smaller telescope in eighteen seventy seven, because they

were not there in eighteen sixty two. Rather, they were launched after eighteen sixty two by an existing Mars civilization, and therefore, uh, were there to be discovered in eighteen seventy seven seems implausible, yes, And Shiklowski dismisses this notion for several reasons, in part because the naval telescope that was actually used to discover the moons, while smaller, was still superior to Herschel's, and he contends that if Yeah, the Shilklowski is very into this idea that the moons

could be artificial, but he's like, the only way this works is if they were also ancient. There's no way that these were just launched in the past few years. Uh. And part of that also comes down to, you know, we've discussed this in terms before, like one of the rules of of observing the cosmos is to realize that or to work from the vantage point that we have we do not have a privileged place in the universe, uh,

in space or in time. So the idea that we just happened to be looking at Mars one day and there were no moons, and then we're looking at it years later and there are moons because they were launched in the interim. That's just it's just too perfect. It's it's just too unlikely. And this is actually one of the reasons that Klowski says that that he thinks that, you know, another reason that that Phobos could have potentially

been some sort of an artificial creation. He points out that it's eventual crash into Mars means that we are in the unlikely position of viewing the moon during its final days. Um, I mean, you can argue that we're not really talking about days, We're talking about millions and millions of years. Uh, it's just astronomically speaking, their days. And he argued that it was quote an unlikely but

not impossible coincidence. Now all of this being said, Chicosi also insisted that if ancient Mars was truly this advanced, advanced enough to create huge artificial satellites and either construct them in orbit, make them out of asteroids, or launched them into orbit around Mars, then we will we're bound to eventually discover evidence of this civilization, not only you know, via the satellites of Mars, but also Mars itself during

the future exploration of the red planet. And as far as the moons themselves go, he said, well, eventually we're going to conduct fly bys and the and the images that we gain from these, this will shed light on them. Will they have special shapes for example? And of course the answer would prove to be yes, but also sort of no as well, because as we've discussed, like, Phobos does have an unusual shape, but it is it a special shape? Is it? Is it a shape that that

screams um artificial construction? Um? I think pretty much everybody would argue no. I can't wait to read the articles about how no, actually the shape of a Yukon gold potato is the perfect shape for for an orbital launch platform or whatever. This thing was supposed to be a space elevator. And I think that's what some of the It's aliens people are saying today, that uh, that that Phobos was an ancient Martian space elevator. Once again, there is no strong evidence of this. Is I mean, it's

find a play around, have fun speculating about that. But you know, understand the difference between playing with an idea and saying like that there's actually strong evidence for it, there is not, right, Yeah, because because certainly Schoklovsky ultimately contended it while his own hypothesis was scientifically sound at the time, though there were some uh, there were some arguments and some and certainly some opposition to his ideas and people saying, well, I don't think we need to

go that far and try try to explain phobos um. Schoklovsky still acknowledged that future explorations would put his hypothesis to the test and that it very well could prove incorrect. And if it proved incorrect, though, uh, then it would have still served the purpose of forcing people to think about the sorts of advanced work that aliens cultures would have constructed or could have constructed, and what would remain of them, and therefore what we could potentially look for, uh,

in terms of of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and extraterrestrial life. Yeah.

And of course, one of the signs of a good hypothesis is that it makes specific predictions that can be tested in the future, right, and uh, you know, and again this means nothing to people who want to run wild with the idea that Phobos is hollow, and as an ancient space elevator, I was looking around briefly and I ran across one of these pages and they referred to Schklovsky here, but they referred to his quote unquote findings, uh as if he had proven, uh, you know, without

any doubt that Phobos was a hollow artificial satellite, and that just that is absolutely not the case, exactly right. But coming back to the original thing leading people off in this direction, while it's not indication of an artificial origin, there is something interesting about the composition of these moons. I mean, so like, if you look at Phobos, it has weird density. It seems very low density for a

moon or an object of this type. So that leads to other questions like what would be the cause of this low density in the moon if it's not, you know, a hollow alien spaceship or something, which again it's not, and what would be the implications of that low density.

And this leads us into our next section because we have some current hypotheses that hold that the density problem is likely solved by in some cases, large spaces within Phobos that are not areas that were hollowed out by an ancient civilization, but could be due to just the the the structural qualities of Phobos itself, the way it came together as essentially a big old heap of space junk, right, And this ties into something else I was reading, actually,

so I was looking at a NASA feature from by Elizabeth Zubritzky called Mars Moon. Phobos is slowly falling apart. So, as we mentioned already, Phobos is doomed to spiral into Mars and either crash into it or break up and become rings. This will probably not happen for tens of millions more years. Actually, the estimates I've seen for this or sort of all over the place. Some say this will happen in thirty to fifty million years, some say

fifty million years, some say a hundred million years. Um. So I don't think that there's an actual really tight, you know limit on that pin down, but it seems somewhere, you know, thirty to a hundred million years from now it is expected to break apart into a ring or crash into Mars. Probably more likely break apart into a ring, which is still pretty close in astronomical time. H Yeah, Well, again,

we're only looking at the end days. Astronomically, from a human standpoint, this is so far in the future that it's it's it's hard to imagine that these will truly be humans that observe it, if humans are around to observe it at all. Right, But you remember last time how we talked about we were looking at surface features of Phobos, and one of the things we talked about where the cat scratches, you know, these long grooves along

the surface of the moon. And so what explains those grooves. Well, in this article it quotes a researcher named Terry Herford of NASA Goddard who says, we think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves. And so Zubritsky writes that quote. Phobos grooves were long thought to be fractures caused by the impact that formed the Stickney Crater.

Remember the Stickney cra It is that huge crater on one face side of Phobos that was named after Angeline Stickney, who worked on observing Mars during the eighteen seventies along with her husband ASoft Hall. But coming back to this article, so the idea was that you had this crater caused by a collision with Phobos long ago quote that collision was so powerful it came close to shattering Phobos. However, scientists eventually determined that the grooves don't radiate outward from

the crater itself, but from a focal point nearby. More recently, researchers have proposed that the grooves may instead be produced by many smaller impacts of material ejected from Mars. But new modeling by Herford and colleagues supports the view that the grooves are more like stretch marks that occur when Phobos gets deformed by tidal forces. Now these would be

tidal forces caused by its close orbit around Mars. Now, remember title forces occur when they're is a significant difference in gravitational forces felt by different parts of the same object, So when something is orbiting close to a huge object, it will often experience tidal forces. A very extreme case of tidal forces would be the idea of spaghettification, the much celebrated way of dying as you go into a

black hole. As the if you're falling feet first, the gradient of gravitational uh forces that you feel as you fall into the black hole are so extreme that the difference between the forces on your feet and the forces on your head would sort of stretch you out like a noodle. But in more mundane scenarios, tidal forces are

also responsible for things like the actual tides right. You know, as as Earth in the Moon orbit each other, they exert gravitational influences that are not evenly distributed on the entire sphere of the other body, but they pull like specifically at the at the facing equatorial region of the other body, right, And so this results in tides in

the water on Earth. But also you can see that the spheres of Earth in the Moon are also kind of the kind of bulge out at the middle around the regions where they're they're most pulled on by the other body. Now, in the case of Phobos, it was once thought that tidal forces should not be strong enough to be stretching apart a moon like this, But that was when Phobos was assumed to be solid all the way through at the time of this writing, and I

wonder how this idea has matured since then. It's possible that there have been some arguments against it in the meantime,

but at least at this time. In these findings from from NASA, Goddard were that the interior of Phobos is more likely to be this kind of loose collection of rubble is sometimes referred to as a rubble pile, and that it's all just sort of barely stuck together and then quote surrounded by a layer of powdery regular about three hundred and thirty feet or a hundred meters thick I mentioned earlier, right, So on this model, you've got this blanket of dusty powdery regular sort of uh, sort

of like acting like the bindle sack for a bunch of rocks that are just barely loosely held together by gravity. So if this model is correct, then there's actually not all that much holding the core of Phobos together. It's just a bunch of junk kind of loosely stuck together by gravity rather than a single massive rocky core, and title forces will have a much easier time ripping it apart than it would ripping apart something that was more solid.

And again, mythologically speaking, I think this sounds perfect. The idea of the war God's son being this this fast and fearful uh creature on the battlefield but ultimately he's just this, this wreck, this just partially hollow, falling apart, doomed, you know, wraith of a warrior. Now, we've been looking a lot at Phobos, and to be fair, I mean, I think there's a reason for that. Like a lot of the real interest and research and big questions have

been focused on Phobos. But Demos is interesting too, So maybe we should take a quick look at Demos in particular. Yeah, Demos is the smaller of the twins. It's nine by seven by six point eight miles in size or fifteen by twelve by eleven kilometers. It goes around Mars every thirty hours. It doesn't have grooves and ridges like Phobos,

but it has plenty of craters. Uh. And while you know normal craters on on other uh, you know, bodies are surrounded by ejective from the impact, you know, the stuff that gets launched up when that impact takes place. Demos is gravity is low enough that impact ejecta achieves escape velocity. Uh, So it doesn't fall just immediately fall back down. Instead, the debris remains in a ring around Dame Us, it seems, and then it's slowly redeposited on

its surface. Now, we talked in the last episode about how, even though Phobos is extremely small for a moon, it's so close to Mars that when you look at it from the surface, it looks pretty substantial in size. It's like, not quite as big as the Moon looks from Earth, but like a substantial fraction of it. You can see it as a disk and not just a dot. The same is not true for Demos. Right from the surface of Mars, Damos would appear star like in the sky.

That's how small it would be. It would just look like a star. Uh, you know, it would you know, and they would stand out a little bit, but it would essentially just look like a star. And that's that's interesting because it runs counter intuitive to what we think

of when we think of a moon. Now, when it comes to named craters on Demos, there are only two, Swift and Voltaire, chosen for obvious reasons, because, as we explored in our first episode, the works of Swift and Voltaire were early works that alluded to Mars having two moons in advance of those two moons actually being discovered. But I was reading in uh In Broca's Brain, the book by Carl Sagan Um. He has a whole section

where he goes into like the naming of Mars. He lists a bunch of the different gods in addition to the gods that we uh that we discussed, that have been associated in different cultures with the planet Mars. Uh. And he shares that in addition to Swift and Voltaire, he wanted to name a third crater of Demos after Um, after Renee Uh Margretti a Belgian surrealist whose paintings featured

large rocks and suspended in the sky. Or at least two of his paintings depicted large rocks suspended in the sky, and they reminded Sagan of the Martian moons quote. The suggestion was, however, voted down as frivolous. But if you look up some of these of these paintings by the

artists like that, they are really cool. They don't you know, they don't look exactly like uh for Boss and Demos, but they are the surrealist images of large rock craggy boulders suspended in the sky over the ocean or a landscape. In one case there's a castle on top of one of these boulders. In another case, you see uh crescent moon in the sky above it clearly an inspiration for Czardas now um and obviously, you know, given it's a very small moon, uh. And it is also further away

from Mars and Phobos. And while Phobos, as we've discussed several times already is faded to one day crash into the red planet or break up against its power, Demos is drifting further away and will one day escape Mars entirely. Uh. Though from a mythological standpoint, this I like. I like this too, because the this doomed, insane godling who will one day earnest freedom, he'll one day escape the awful

war god uh that that he has served. But he's just gonna wander out into the waist of the Solar System, perhaps crash into lesser deities or mortals and die by bare hands instead, or just wander aimlessly. So that's it's kind of perfect in its own way. Now we've talked about the idea of missions to the moons of Mars in order to study them and perhaps even return a sample from them that would allow us to better understand where they come from and what they are. There's actually

another one of these scheduled. It's Japan's Martian Moons Exploration or the MMX mission of Jackson, the Japanese Space Agency, which is currently scheduled to launch in and perform an orbital insertion around Mars in and so it would travel to survey both of the planet's moons. And then the idea is that it will land on Phobos and collect a sample from Phobos to bring back to Earth for study.

And major scientific objectives of this mission would include determining the origin of Phobos and Demos, so possibly answering these big questions that we've been talking about all this research on today. So are they actually captured asteroids that just happened to have these very tidy orbits? Are they the result of a giant impact with Mars long ago and so forth? And uh? And also we should be able to study the history of Mars itself by looking at

these moons. But as far as space exploration goes, there's another interesting thing about the moon Phobos, which is that it has often been proposed as a potentially useful base of operations for space missions. Yeah, for the same reason, Shklovsky outlined it would be advantageous to have a moon like Phobos above your Mars. If Phobos did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it. And since it

does exist, it would make a handy base. Yeah, And so one of the things is that it has been proposed as a remote control base of operations for surface

robots on Mars. So this would eliminate the problem that when we want to control rovers and explore Asian vehicles on the surface of Mars, there is a large time delay between Earth and Mars where we have to wait after we transmit a command signal for that signal to reach the robot and it performs the operation, and then we have to wait to receive feedback, and this can be a while while you're just sitting there, you know, waiting for your your signal, your remote control signal to

reach the rover. And so that this can cause a lot of slow down and difficulty in these kind of missions. If you could get your humans onto the surface of Phobos, they could essentially control things operating on the surface of Mars remotely in real time. And it would be better trying to put humans on the surface of Phobos than trying to put them on the surface of Mars itself. Because it's a lot easier to get back from the surface of Phobos than it is to get back from

Mars itself. To get off of the surface of Mars, you need a powerful rocket to leave the gravity well of the planet. Getting off of Phobos would be would be a cake walk in comparison. Now, of course, putting humans or even just probes on the surface of Phobos would still be plenty difficult. And I was reading about

one possible complication that really fascinated me. This was in another NASA press release that I was looking at from October of seventeen by Bills Stegerwald and Nancy Jones, and it is about research suggesting that solar eruptions may have a tendency to electrically charge up the surface of Phobos two hundreds of volts quote, presenting a complex electrical environment that could possibly affect sensitive electronics carried by future robotic explorers,

according to a new NASA study. The study also considered electrical charges that could develop as astronauts transit the surface on potential human missions to Phobos, and they quote a researcher named William Farrell of NASA Goddard who says, we found that astronauts or rovers could accumulate it's significant electric charges when traversing the night side of Phobos, the side facing Mars during the Martian day. So why would this happen? Why would Phobos turn into a giant Ben Franklin Turkey

killing jar. Well, fortunately, the electric charge is not quite that powerful. I think it is not at the Turkey killing jar levels. It seems unlikely that it would be in the human injury range at least most of the time, but it might be enough to screw up sensors and sensitive or delicate electronic equipment. So what gives What would cause this? Well, Phobos and Demos both have no atmosphere, and they are exposed to solar wind, which is a

giant stream of charged particles. You can think of it as a kind of electric gas that's blowing off of the surface of the Sun in every direction at a million miles per hour. So solar wind hits the day side of Phobos, that would be the side that's facing the Sun, and some of the plasma gets absorbed on the day side, but then the rest flows around the rocky mass of Phobos, and this creates a void of solar wind on the night side of Phobos and the solar wind is made up of two major types of

charge particles. You've got electrons, which of course are negative, and then you've got ions, pieces of atoms that can be positively charged. And the electrons are much lighter than the ions. So the article again quotes William Farrell of NASA Goddard, who says, quote, the electrons act like fighter jets. They're able to turn quickly around an obstacle, and the ions are like big, heavy bombers. They change directions slowly.

This means that the light electrons push in ahead of the heavy ions, and the resulting electric field forces the ions into the plasma void behind Phobos. According to our models, and so the result is that the night side of Phobos builds up significant static electricity. Quote. The study shows that this plasma void behind Phobos make a to situation

where astronauts and rovers build up significant electric charges. For example, if astronauts were to walk across the night side surface, friction could transfer charge from the dust and rock on the surface to their space suits. This dust and rock is a very poor conductor of electricity, so the charge can't flow back easily into the surface. And charge starts to build up on the space suits. On the day side, the electrically conducting solar wind and solar ultra violet radiation

can remove the excess charge on the suit. But on the night side, the ion and electron densities in the trailing plasma void are so low they cannot compensate or dissipate the charge build up. And so the team looked into this and they found that the static charge could reach up to ten thousand volts on some materials that would be moving across the surface. And some of those materials would include like the teflon suits that that astronauts

have used in the Apollo lunar missions. And of course this leads so you hold up a gigantic static electric charge on your space suit and then you go and touch something. It's like you know when when you you shuffle across the carpet and then use zap your family members. They also point out that this is always going to be the case when solar wind is blowing onto Phobos, but it's going to be especially bad during heavy sun weather, such as in the wake of a coronal mass ejection.

So astronauts on the surface of phobos might need. I don't know that they may need mitigation measures for this, somehow to avoid accumulating static electricity in this way. I was wondering. I was looking it up. Do they make those anti static socks I've seen before. I don't know if those actually work. Those might be a scam. I've never really looked into it. Oh yeah, I mean, I guess they'd be useful if you're touching a lot of electronics and stuff. But if you're just like a kid,

they seem like a horrible invention. Why would you take this gift of static electricity away from them? Oh? I know you. You like zapping people, don't you. Um. I

actually don't zap people as much in intentionally. But one thing that my son and I have always enjoyed is if the if atmospheric conditions are right, he can go down a slide at a playground and he'll build up that electric charge on the way down, and then he can give me a high five, and when he gets to the bottom of the slide and it will be what we call an electric high five, because it will be an actual static shock to it. So I do go if that a lot? Uh, you know, always a

hit with the kids. That's so beautiful I'm gonna cry. But as far as Phobos goes this, this whole scenario you just discussed here, it made me think like this would be perfect. You have like a Phobos space Western kind of like the Sean Connery movie Outlander. Um Outland not Outlander. Yes, yes, the Killed TV show, uh, which which is also entertaining. But now this is this is uh, this is a space Western scenario where you have your astronaut and he's been left for dead, uh, you know,

on the far side of Phobos. But he's not dead. So he comes trooping back walking across the waste land of Phobos, just building up static electricity with each vengeful step until he can get back to the habitat and and zap his killers or would be killers. Brutal. Yeah. I don't know if the science completely works, but I think there's enough science there that you could make it work in a science fiction property. Well hey, okay, so we love the cool idea of the holo Phobos, but

there's not good evidence that it's actually true. Put it in the science fiction movie. Uh, the there is actually evidence that you get this electric build up on Phobos' is probably not enough to do the like electric weapon idea you want to do, but they put it in the science fiction movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you use it as a jumping off point to create your your your science flavored fantasy. I'm all for that. All right, Well, there you habit. We're gonna go ahead and close out

our look at the moons of Mars. We'll hope you and enjoyed this. We enjoyed it, and you know it's a great opportunity to bust out some planetary uh information, to discuss mythology a bit, and uh, I guess the big question is would you like us to continue this journey now that we have started it again? Should we move on to other moons, other planets? Uh, you know, even planets that that don't have moons. I don't know if we've I can't remember if we've ever ever done

like a proper look at the planet Mercury. I know we've looked at at Venus a few times, but I don't know that we've really looked at Mercury. So may you know, maybe that's uh in the cards. Let us know. We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, If you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, well, you can find us anywhere you get your podcasts. Go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind Podcasts feed you'll find core science and culture episodes

of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we publish artifacts on Wednesday's listener Mail. On Monday's Friday's that's when we bust out weird how Cinema. That's our time to just discuss some weird movies and sometimes there's a little science sprinkled in there. And then on the weekends we do a bit of a rerun. Yeah, I gotta catch them all huge things. As always to our

excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.