Tuesday Telescope: A rare glimpse of one of the smallest known moons

I'll bet you don't spend a ton of time thinking about Deimos.

I'll bet you don't spend a ton of time thinking about Deimos, the smaller of the two Martian moons, which is named after the Ancient Greek god that personified dread.

And who could blame you? Of the two Martian moons, Phobos gets more attention, including as a possible waystation for human missions to Mars. Phobos is larger than Deimos, with a radius of 11 km, and closer to the Martian surface, a little more than 9,000 km away.

By contrast, Deimos is tiny, with a radius of 6 km, and quite a bit further out, more than 23,000 km from the surface. It is so small that, on the surface of Mars, Deimos would only appear about as bright in the night sky as Venus does from Earth.

But who doesn't love a good underdog story? Scientists have dreamed up all kinds of uses for Deimos, including using its sands for aerobraking large missions to Mars, returning samples from the tiny moon. So maybe Deimos will eventually get its day.

Recently, we got one of our best views yet of the tiny moon when a European mission named Hera, en route to the asteroid Didymos, flew through the Martian system for a gravity assist. During this transit, the spacecraft came within just 300 km of Deimos. And its Asteroid Framing Camera captured this lovely image, which was, admittedly, artificially colored.

Anyway, it's a rare glimpse at one of the smallest known moons in the Solar System, and I think it's spectacular.

Source: European Space Agency

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