Introduction
Recently, I have stumbled upon an article about Mars moons. To be honest, I didn’t know that Mars has any moons at all until I read the article. Anyhow, after reading the article, I decided to write a short blog post to introduce Mars moons for those, like me, who don’t know about them.
Mars moons
Mars has two moons named Phobos and Deimos. Phobos is the bigger one and Deimos is the smaller. Both have irregular shapes and compare with the earth-moon are too small. The Phobos radius is 11.267 km, and Deimos one is 6.2 km. Whereas, the earth-moon has the radius of 1,737.1 km.
Phobos
Phobos rises from the west and sets in the east. This takes only eleven hours. Phobos has the average orbital period of 7 hours, moon is 27 days with the average orbital speed of 2.138 km/s, moon is 1.022 km/s.
Deimos
On the other hand, Deimos rises from the east and sets in the west. This takes 131 hours with the average orbital period of 1.263 days and the average orbital speed of 1.3513 km/s.
Reference
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Mars
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimos_(moon)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_(moon)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
- https://www.geo.fu-berlin.de/en/geol/fachrichtungen/planet/press/archiv2018/phobos_deimos1/index.html
- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181125.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1302.html