Martian Moon’s Orbit Hints at an Ancient Ring of Mars PRESS RELEASE DATE June 2, 2020 CONTACT Rebecca McDonald Director of Communications SETI Institute rmcdonald@seti.org +1 650-960-4526 Photo credit:...
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Martian Moon’s Orbit Hints at an Ancient Ring of Mars PRESS RELEASE DATE June 2, 2020 CONTACT Rebecca McDonald Director of Communications SETI Institute rmcdonald@seti.org +1 650-960-4526 Photo credit: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/mars-moons/deimos/in-depth/ June 2, 2020, Mountain View, CA – Scientists from the SETI Institute and Purdue University have found that the only way to produce Deimos’s unusually tilted orbit is for Mars to have had a ring billions of years ago. While some of the more massive planets in our solar system have giant rings and numerous big moons, Mars only has two small, misshapen moons, Phobos and Deimos. Although these moons are small, their peculiar orbits hide important secrets about their past. For a long time, scientists believed that Mars’s two moons, discovered in 1877, were captured asteroids. However, since their orbits are almost in the same plane as Mars’s equator, that the moons must have formed at the same time as Mars. But the orbit of the sm
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