“UAE’s Hope spacecraft captures stunning photos of Deimos, Mars’ small moon”

MAGENTA — The United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) Amal spacecraft has sent the most detailed photo of Mars’ small moon, Deimos.

Amal, which means Hope in Arabic, flew within 100 Km of Deimos last month. The close-up shot was released on Monday (24/4/2023).

Luckily, in some photos, Deimos and Mars are caught in the same frame. Amal became the closest spaceship to Deimos in almost half a century.

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The spacecraft also observed the little-explored far side of the strangely crater-shaped moon, 15 km by 12 km by 12 km. The red planet’s other moon, Phobos, is almost twice the size and better understood because it orbits closer to Mars.

Phobos is only 6,000 Km away, the closest moon of any planet in our solar system. Deimos’ orbit around Mars stretches for 23 thousand Km.

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That distance is close to the inside of the spacecraft’s orbit. “This is what makes observing Deimos such an interesting idea,” said the mission’s principal scientist Hessa Al-Matroushi, reported in Arab NewsMonday.

He added in the email that Phobos got a lot of attention and now it’s Deimos’ turn. Al-Matroushi and other scientists from the UAE Space Agency say these new images show Deimos is not an asteroid captured in Mars orbit thousands of years ago, the leading theory until now.

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Instead, they say the moon appears to have come from Mars, perhaps from a larger Martian moon or from Mars itself. The findings were presented Monday at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

Charity will continue to pass through Deimos this year, but not as close as the March 10 meeting, according to Al-Matroushi. NASA’s Viking 2 spacecraft was only 30 km from Deimos in 1977. Since then, other spacecraft have photographed Deimos, but from a much greater distance.

Amal rockets to Mars on July 19, 2020, one day before the 50th anniversary of the first human moon landing by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11.

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