3 Oddities Of Phobos That Could Point To Extraterrestrial Life
Mars’s tiny moon sure is a strange beast
Mars’s moon Phobos is odd. Measuring only 6.9 miles in diameter, it is closer to a large asteroid than a small moon. It orbits Mars at a paltry 5,738 miles at its closest point. In comparison, our moon orbits the Earth at around 238,900 miles.
It is so small and so close to Mars that it was only discovered in 1877 and even then, we could not get much meaningful data on it until we started conducting space flybys in the 1970s. Even now, we are still collecting data from the relatively new addition to the landscape of our solar system. The Mars Express mission being run by the European Space Agency is collecting new data about the Red Planet and its moons even now.
The more we learn about Phobos, the stranger it becomes and it has had periods in the spotlight as potential evidence for extraterrestrial life either from Mars or from beyond the solar system.
Here are three of the strangest things we have discovered about the moon Phobos.
