Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault. This is Phobos and Demos,
Speaker 1: Part two, picking up where we left off last Saturday.
Speaker 1: This originally aired on April. All right, let's jump right in.
Speaker 1: Welcome to stot to Blow Your Mind production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: we're back with part two of our talk about the
Speaker 1: moons of Mars, Phobos and Demos. Now, in the last episode,
Speaker 1: we talked a bit about the mythology behind the moons
Speaker 1: of Mars, the companions and sons of the war god
Speaker 1: Aries the Roman Mars, the god of War, and we
Speaker 1: talked about how the names of these came to be
Speaker 1: applied to the moons of Mars, these two small objects
Speaker 1: that were discovered in the late nineteenth century. We talked
Speaker 1: about that discovery story. We talked about some of the
Speaker 1: basic properties of Phobos and Demos and why there is
Speaker 1: some question about what their origin was. We're gonna get
Speaker 1: into more detail about that today. And we ended up
Speaker 1: talking about a bizarre conspiracy theory about an interesting surface
Speaker 1: feature of Phobos that really had nothing to it. But
Speaker 1: the surface feature, known as the Phobos Monolith, is inherently
Speaker 1: very interesting. Yeah, and so in this episode, we're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna cover more interesting stuff about Phobos and demos, uh,
Speaker 1: stuff about the history of its exploration. We'll get into
Speaker 1: another idea that conspiracy theorists seem to really like concerning
Speaker 1: one of the two moons. There'll be a dash of
Speaker 1: mythology here and there, but it should be a fun ride, now, Robin.
Speaker 1: The last episode, we were talking about how close the
Speaker 1: moon Phobos is to Mars. It is the loosest moon
Speaker 1: to its host planet in the entire Solar System. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's so close. I think it's a it's a matter
Speaker 1: of you know, just like several thousand kilometers. It's a
Speaker 1: distance that is a little bit longer than the driving
Speaker 1: distance between Miami and Vancouver, as we talked about the
Speaker 1: last time. So you know, if you if there were
Speaker 1: a road between them, you could drive it in two
Speaker 1: or three days. And that's incredibly close for a moon
Speaker 1: to uh to orbit its host planet. But I found
Speaker 1: Another point of comparison that we didn't make in the
Speaker 1: last episode that I thought was absolutely astounding, and it's
Speaker 1: that the moon Phobos orbits so close to the surface
Speaker 1: of Mars that if you are standing near the polar
Speaker 1: regions of Mars, sometimes you can't see the Moon even
Speaker 1: when it's on the same side of the planet as you,
Speaker 1: because it's blocked by the horizon. It's orbiting down near
Speaker 1: the equator and you can't see it over the curvature
Speaker 1: of Mars itself. That that's unbelievable. Yeah, that is that
Speaker 1: is pretty amazing. And of course, as we discussed, it's
Speaker 1: getting closer to Mars and will eventually, uh you know,
Speaker 1: millions and millions of years in the future, will actually
Speaker 1: crash into Mars or break up in orbit and become
Speaker 1: a new ring around the planet. Yeah, they're gonna tussle. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But one of the things we also alluded to in
Speaker 1: the last episode is that these two moons, Phobos and Demos,
Speaker 1: have extremely weird properties that really raise questions about where
Speaker 1: they come from in the first place. And you can
Speaker 1: ask this about moons all throughout the Solar System, like
Speaker 1: there is some question about where the moon of Earth
Speaker 1: came from those. There's a there's a pretty strong leading
Speaker 1: theory that is the giant impact hypothesis, the idea that
Speaker 1: early during the formation of Earth, Earth was hit by
Speaker 1: a planetestimal or you know, a Mars sized object roughly,
Speaker 1: and that giant impact created a bunch of debris and
Speaker 1: eventually the what was left over coalesced into the Earth
Speaker 1: and then the Moon in orbit around the Earth. Indeed, uh,
Speaker 1: certain properties of these moons as well discussed here, tend
Speaker 1: to lend themselves more to one interpretation, and other properties
Speaker 1: if you focus on those, lend towards another interpretation, which
Speaker 1: leads to just a fair amount of you know, continued confusion,
Speaker 1: but also intense fascination. Yeah. There's an article about this
Speaker 1: that we were both reading that kind of sums up
Speaker 1: some of the debate pretty nicely. It was published in
Speaker 1: The New York Times by Robin George Andrews in July,
Speaker 1: called why the super weird Moons of Mars Fascinates Scientists,
Speaker 1: and it briefly goes over some of the arguments either
Speaker 1: way is now um. One of the things that points
Speaker 1: out is that if you're just to look at the
Speaker 1: what the moons appear to be made of you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're sort of physical characteristics in and of themselves.
Speaker 1: They look a lot like captured asteroids, asteroids that at
Speaker 1: some point would have been bumped off course and then
Speaker 1: caught in the gravity well of Mars, so that they
Speaker 1: ended up just orbiting Mars permanently. Yeah, the the the
Speaker 1: asteroid capture hypothesis, which which which is a popular one,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't quite explain everything right now in its favor.
Speaker 1: One of the main things that has going for it
Speaker 1: is that the material that the Martian moons are made
Speaker 1: of looks a lot like asteroid type material. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that they they look like asteroids. They seem to be
Speaker 1: composed of the same material as asteroids, And yeah, they
Speaker 1: would have just ended up too close to mars gravitational
Speaker 1: pull and would have been simply orbitally dominated by the
Speaker 1: planet Mars. The god of War says, you too, you
Speaker 1: you shattered wrecks. You are now my son's come with me,
Speaker 1: right into battle with me. It's like in the cop
Speaker 1: movie when you commandeer the vehicle. You know, I'm commandeering
Speaker 1: this vehicle, or James Bond gets into somebody's car and
Speaker 1: drives off with it, or I guess it would be
Speaker 1: more like tying a car to you and making it
Speaker 1: swing around you. I guess that analogy isn't that great,
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's it's saying you're coming with me now, right.
Speaker 1: But the other interesting thing is that they have that
Speaker 1: kind of throws this off. Is they have near equatorial orbits,
Speaker 1: and Is Andrews points out in this article this suggests
Speaker 1: that they coalesced from a disc of debris that danced
Speaker 1: around a very young Mars. So it basically it's just
Speaker 1: all too neat and tidy surely to be an asteroid capture.
Speaker 1: So in other words, like, okay, if there, if it's
Speaker 1: asteroid capture, these are like wildcats. But if they're wildcats,
Speaker 1: why are they behaving like orbital house cats? So so
Speaker 1: that's that's part of the big confusion here. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you've got some creepy space yukon golds that look like
Speaker 1: they're made of roughly asteroid stuff. But the way they
Speaker 1: orbit Mars, it's a couple of things actually that their
Speaker 1: orbits are near equatorial, meaning that they orbit basically, you know,
Speaker 1: not exactly but pretty close to around the equator line
Speaker 1: of Mars. You know, in between polls. And then the
Speaker 1: other part is that their orbits are nearly perfectly circular.
Speaker 1: And this is just not what you would expect to
Speaker 1: see with a captured asteroid. If an asteroid came in
Speaker 1: that was originally orbiting the Sun at a different speed
Speaker 1: and then it just got stuck in the gravity well
Speaker 1: of Mars, what you would probably expect to see is
Speaker 1: that its orbit would be more irregular, some more stretched out, right.
Speaker 1: You know, that's often when something gets captured by an
Speaker 1: object and it was originally on its own trajectory, it
Speaker 1: tends to have a more stretched out oval type orbit.
Speaker 1: But then the other thing is you would expect its
Speaker 1: orbit to be tilted at a steeper angle rather than
Speaker 1: neatly orbiting pretty close to its equatorial line. And then
Speaker 1: there's one more factor that I think is worth considering.
Speaker 1: This is actually cited in that article in The New
Speaker 1: York Times by Robin George Andrews. And Andrews quotes a
Speaker 1: Japanese scientist named Tomohiro Usui who points out that also
Speaker 1: Mars gravity is pretty weak. I mean, you know, you
Speaker 1: can capture an asteroid, but Tamohiro Sui points out that
Speaker 1: Mars has like a tenth of Earth's mass, So it's
Speaker 1: kind of improbable that it would be able to capture
Speaker 1: two asteroids that are traveling by at orbital speeds, you know,
Speaker 1: speeds of orbiting the Sun. So it just seems kind
Speaker 1: of unlikely as an origin story for them, and their
Speaker 1: orbits really don't seem to match what you would expect
Speaker 1: from from asteroid capture. Now, there is another hypothesis that
Speaker 1: would make some sense, which is that what if the
Speaker 1: moons of Mars were formed from a debris disc that
Speaker 1: was kicked up into orbit around Mars after a colossal impact.
Speaker 1: So not exactly the same as but but similar to
Speaker 1: one of the leading ideas about where the Earth's moon
Speaker 1: comes from. There's a giant impact on Mars at some point,
Speaker 1: and that shoots all this stuff in to space around Mars,
Speaker 1: which gradually coalesces into a disc that's in orbit around Mars,
Speaker 1: and then that disc gravitationally coalesces into solid objects, these
Speaker 1: two moons. Now there's some reasons for doubting that as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, one idea offered in this article is that
Speaker 1: demos is orbit is maybe a little too far out
Speaker 1: to be explained that way, but that could possibly be overcome.
Speaker 1: One paper I was looking at that supports the idea
Speaker 1: of a giant impact is The original source of Phobos
Speaker 1: and Demos was published in Nature Geoscience by Pascal Rosenblatt
Speaker 1: at all and it's called accretion of Phobos and Demos
Speaker 1: in an extended debris disc stirred by transient moons um
Speaker 1: and so that they write in their abstract that quote.
Speaker 1: Here we use numerical simulations to suggest that Phobos and
Speaker 1: Demos accreeded from the outer portion of a debris disc
Speaker 1: formed after a giant impact on Mars. In our mulations,
Speaker 1: larger moons form from material in the denser inner disc
Speaker 1: and migrate outwards due to gravitational interactions with the disc.
Speaker 1: The resulting orbital resonances spread outwards and gathered dispersed outer
Speaker 1: disc debris, facilitating accretion into two satellites of sizes similar
Speaker 1: to Phobos and Demos. The larger inner moons fall back
Speaker 1: to Mars after about five million years due to the
Speaker 1: title poll of the planet, after which the two outer
Speaker 1: satellites evolve into Phobos and Demos like orbits. The proposed
Speaker 1: scenario can explain why Mars has two small satellites instead
Speaker 1: of one large moon. Our model predicts that Phobos and
Speaker 1: Demos are composed of a mixture of material from Mars
Speaker 1: and the impact or so. Again, this would be kind
Speaker 1: of similar to the Earth's moon origin story. There's a
Speaker 1: giant impact on Mars long long ago. It spits out
Speaker 1: all this debris into orbit around Mars that forms into
Speaker 1: multiple moons at different orbital distances, and interactions between those
Speaker 1: eventually cause inner moons to be destroyed spiraling into Mars
Speaker 1: as Phobos will one day do, and then UH, and
Speaker 1: then these other objects to coalesce into the current orbits
Speaker 1: that we see for Phobos and Demos. So that's one
Speaker 1: plausible possibility they've put together. Yeah, and this satisfies some
Speaker 1: of the mysteries that we discussed earlier. How can it
Speaker 1: be uh and have the qualities of an asteroid capture
Speaker 1: but also have the qualities of something that formed out
Speaker 1: of a disk around Mars. Now we've mentioned that Phobos
Speaker 1: as its spirals into Mars will probably break apart. I mean,
Speaker 1: we mentioned a couple options. It could just crash into Mars.
Speaker 1: More of the sources that I was reading seemed to
Speaker 1: suggest that the more likely option is that as it
Speaker 1: spirals into Mars, it will be sort of ripped apart
Speaker 1: by tidal forces and it will break up and become
Speaker 1: rings in orbit around Mars. But really interesting question that
Speaker 1: I came across in another study in Nature Geoscience, this
Speaker 1: one published in This is the question of what if
Speaker 1: this future scenario where Phobos breaks up in orbit around
Speaker 1: Mars and becomes rings, what if that has already happened.
Speaker 1: Very interesting origin hypothesis for for these two moons. So
Speaker 1: this is by Andrew J. Hessel Brock and David A. Minton. Again,
Speaker 1: that's Nature Geoscience in seen called an ongoing satellite ring
Speaker 1: cycle of Mars and the origins of Phobos and Demos.
Speaker 1: Now this uh. This explanation has a similar beginning as
Speaker 1: the last one, but some of the details are different.
Speaker 1: Again to read from their abstract, the Martian moons Phobos
Speaker 1: and Demos may have acreated from a ring of impact debris,
Speaker 1: but explaining their origin from a single giant impact has
Speaker 1: proven difficult. One clue may lie in the orbit of
Speaker 1: Phobos that is slowly decaying as the satellite undergoes tidal
Speaker 1: interactions with Mars. In about seventy million years, Phobos is
Speaker 1: predicted to reach the location of title, breakup and break
Speaker 1: apart to form a new ring around the planet. Here,
Speaker 1: we use numerical simulations to suggest that the resulting ring
Speaker 1: will viscously spread to eventually deposit about eight percent of
Speaker 1: debris onto Mars. The remaining twenty of debris will accrete
Speaker 1: into a new generation of satellites. Furthermore, we propose that
Speaker 1: this process has occurred repeatedly throughout Martian history. In our simulations,
Speaker 1: beginning with a large satellite formed after giant impact with
Speaker 1: early Mars, we find that between three and seven ring
Speaker 1: satellite cycles over the past four point three billion years
Speaker 1: can explain Phobos and Demos as they are observed today.
Speaker 1: Such a scenario implies the deposition of significant ring material
Speaker 1: onto Mars during each cycle. We hypothesize that some anomalous
Speaker 1: sedimentary deposits observed on Mars maybe linked to these periodic
Speaker 1: episodes of ring deposition. So Phobos or the ancestor of
Speaker 1: Phobos could have been once much larger, maybe twenty times
Speaker 1: more massive. But then there's this pattern that repeats over time,
Speaker 1: almost like you know, the mythological cycle of history, where
Speaker 1: there's orbital decay. It's it's going closer and closer down
Speaker 1: into Mars. It shatters from tidal forces. It's you know, turned,
Speaker 1: It splits apart into a million pieces, forms a ring
Speaker 1: around Mars. The pieces of the ring then coalesce into
Speaker 1: a moon, and then repeat with the moon getting smaller
Speaker 1: every cycle. I love this because if you if you
Speaker 1: take it and then apply it to the mythological model
Speaker 1: that we've been discussing here, you have Mars, who is
Speaker 1: you know, actually more the the you know, we can
Speaker 1: would think more of the Greek war god aries representing
Speaker 1: the worst of war, just the the bloodshed and the screams.
Speaker 1: Just this awful deity, the god of the screams of
Speaker 1: the dying. Yeah, yeah, the god of the screams of
Speaker 1: the dying. And so it makes sense that his two
Speaker 1: loyal sons who are destined to rebel against him have
Speaker 1: always rebelled against him, Like there's a cycle of them
Speaker 1: rebelling against the Almighty Fad. They're here being destroyed, breaking up,
Speaker 1: but then he reforms them. You know, it's like they're
Speaker 1: resurrected to continue to serve them as these kind of
Speaker 1: misshapen wraiths. Oh man, Yeah, I love that. Another way
Speaker 1: to think about it is if you're talking about a
Speaker 1: god of war. I mean, this is the process of attrition, right,
Speaker 1: slowly wearing down your enemy's forces over time. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they keep coming back, but each time weaker and weaker. Now,
Speaker 1: like many things in space science, this is one of
Speaker 1: these great fascinating open questions that really could uh we
Speaker 1: could really have a better chance of solving if we
Speaker 1: were to have more physical data to work with. And
Speaker 1: so this is one of the many reasons that there
Speaker 1: have been all these proposed missions to the moons of Mars,
Speaker 1: and including that, there's a there's an upcoming mission that
Speaker 1: we'll talk about in a bit from the Japanese Space
Speaker 1: Agency from Jackson that is planning to go to the
Speaker 1: moons of Mars in I think it's supposed to launch
Speaker 1: in twenty four and hopefully arrive in five. But there
Speaker 1: we could learn more the composition of these moons, which
Speaker 1: could maybe tell us more about their history. But to
Speaker 1: come back to that New York Times article we were
Speaker 1: talking about, Uh, there's a part of it which says, quote,
Speaker 1: although made of ancient matter, the phobos we see today
Speaker 1: may have been assembled just two hundred million years ago.
Speaker 1: If it were confirmed that Phobos is a haphazardly clumped
Speaker 1: together mass, it would be a revelation suggesting planets with
Speaker 1: rings are the norm for our Solar system. And I
Speaker 1: had to think about that for a second, and then
Speaker 1: I realized, like, oh, yeah, okay, So if it's normal
Speaker 1: for Mars to have a ring and we just happened
Speaker 1: to be observing it during one of its you know,
Speaker 1: interring periods, one of its ringless periods, that would mean
Speaker 1: the majority of planets in our Solar system have rings.
Speaker 1: Jupiter as rings, Saturn has huge rings, uh Uranus has rings.
Speaker 1: So you'd realize that rings are the standard and a
Speaker 1: planet without rings is actually weirder. Yeah, I guess It's
Speaker 1: kind of like thinking about cities, right. Um Imagine you
Speaker 1: know most cities have some sort of sprawling suburbs, but
Speaker 1: maybe you have a city that doesn't really have suburbs,
Speaker 1: but just has like a a centralized satellite uh town
Speaker 1: outside of it, maybe to such satellite towns. Um that
Speaker 1: if that was the main thing you saw, you might think, oh,
Speaker 1: this is just how it works, this is how cities
Speaker 1: are come together. Though, one thing I should point out
Speaker 1: from that article that they quote. Again, the Japanese researcher
Speaker 1: tell me Hero sue who says that you know, this
Speaker 1: that we were just talking about could possibly be true
Speaker 1: of Phobos, but at the same time not for Demos.
Speaker 1: It's possible that they you know, that they have these
Speaker 1: different origins, that they're not exactly the same thing. So
Speaker 1: Demos could be much older than Phobos potentially. Uh Suey
Speaker 1: says that Demos could be three point five billion years old,
Speaker 1: whereas it's it's possible that Phobos is much much younger,
Speaker 1: just like two million years old. But again it's one
Speaker 1: of those things that it'll be hard to know for
Speaker 1: sure until we send something there and maybe even bring
Speaker 1: part of it back. I'm really need to get weird.
Speaker 1: Do you want to talk about some weird historical hypotheses
Speaker 1: about photos? Yeah, concerning the idea of a hollow Phobos. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing I want to stress here is again we'd
Speaker 1: love to have physical evidence, physical material to look at
Speaker 1: regarding Phobos and Demos, but we don't yet. Hopefully in
Speaker 1: the future, but we don't have it now. What we
Speaker 1: have are, in addition to various other readings, we have
Speaker 1: visual images taken via fly bys and and and Mars missions,
Speaker 1: But there was a time where we didn't have those
Speaker 1: additional um images. So I want to go back to
Speaker 1: the late nineteen fifties and ultimately to the decades preceding that,
Speaker 1: and the work of Russian astrophysicist, uh Joseph Shklovsky, who
Speaker 1: hypothesized that Phobos might be hollow and even more to
Speaker 1: the point, might be an artificial structure. Oh yeah, now
Speaker 1: you also Shaklovsky was born nineteen sixteen died nine five.
Speaker 1: He was a Soviet astronomer and astrophysicist. And we've actually
Speaker 1: mentioned him on the show before because he co wrote
Speaker 1: and he had for the main credited author on intelligent
Speaker 1: Life in the Universe with Carl Sagan in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: I believe we discussed it in our Look at Ancient
Speaker 1: Astronaut hypothesis, which uh, you know, the basics of which
Speaker 1: they went into in this book. Uh in a in
Speaker 1: a way, this this book was was kind of pivotal
Speaker 1: to the whole Ancient Aliens movement, even though I have
Speaker 1: to stress the Chaklovsky and Sagan they discussed it rather
Speaker 1: uh you know, very in a very grounded nature very scientifically. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's other authors who really have would run wild
Speaker 1: with it and um and just you know, go off
Speaker 1: the speculative deep end with it. You know, there's something
Speaker 1: I noticed in the in the responsible science journalism of
Speaker 1: today that is a kind of automatic, reactive uh opposition
Speaker 1: to the subject of like aliens or evidence for aliens.
Speaker 1: And and I get it right, because if you're covering space,
Speaker 1: if you're covering astronomy, if you're covering space missions, you know,
Speaker 1: in anything having to do with space, one of the
Speaker 1: things you're going to be dealing with most often is
Speaker 1: people irresponsibly taking some piece of evidence that in no
Speaker 1: way really indicates evidence of alien life and saying it's aliens,
Speaker 1: and that they're just going to be doing that over
Speaker 1: and over again, and then you just end up having
Speaker 1: to spend your career writing article after article of like, no,
Speaker 1: this rock on Mars is not an alien. There's no
Speaker 1: reason you have to conclude that. You know, natural wind
Speaker 1: erosion can cause features that look strange like this, here's how,
Speaker 1: And then you can end up explaining interesting things about
Speaker 1: natural science about like how wind erosion can cause something
Speaker 1: to look sculpted or designed in a certain way or
Speaker 1: you you know, you end up saying like, no, we
Speaker 1: we don't have any reason to conclude yet that the
Speaker 1: signal coming from this star, even though it's like repeating,
Speaker 1: is an alien. And then you can explain stuff about
Speaker 1: pulsars and how they work and what we know about them,
Speaker 1: and that's all good stuff. But I think because there
Speaker 1: is such a tendency for for hoax hype people and
Speaker 1: for the public generally to get over excited about something
Speaker 1: that's mysterious and say therefore it's aliens, you can start
Speaker 1: getting opposed to even playing with the idea of aliens, right.
Speaker 1: It starts to become like subject matter that's almost like
Speaker 1: inherently revolting to you. Does that make any sense? And
Speaker 1: I'm very much like I I very much respect all
Speaker 1: the skeptical work, you know, and we do that too,
Speaker 1: Like we we end up having to say, like, no,
Speaker 1: there's no reason to conclude this is aliens. Nothing we
Speaker 1: have ever discovered in space is definitely aliens. There's no
Speaker 1: reason to think that there's never even really been a
Speaker 1: strong piece of evidence for aliens that we've come across. Uh.
Speaker 1: I think there's no reason at all to go from
Speaker 1: there to say, so they're for like, don't play around
Speaker 1: with the idea of aliens, Like what would what would
Speaker 1: be evidence if we were defined it? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's kind of like with the Muamua. You know, I
Speaker 1: think there's gonna be there're gonna be people out there
Speaker 1: who are just always going to be convinced that was
Speaker 1: a spaceship. It wasn't It was not a spaceship, right,
Speaker 1: But you know, certainly the spaceship interpretation is one that
Speaker 1: is you know, way weird, way like easier to fathom
Speaker 1: because it's so uh, it's so based in science fiction.
Speaker 1: You know, you don't need a breakdown a discussion of
Speaker 1: like why this thing was ejected from from some distant
Speaker 1: uh interstellar locale, you know. Um, And yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: more exciting. But to a certain extent, any coverage of
Speaker 1: Mumu will always involve having to to really remind everybody
Speaker 1: that there is there's there's no strong evidence that it
Speaker 1: was a spaceship, that it was not a spaceship, but
Speaker 1: let's explore these these also these other fascinating ideas and
Speaker 1: hypotheses concerning its origin and its nature. Sure, So, I
Speaker 1: mean I feel very attracted kind of the Carl Sagan outlook,
Speaker 1: never saying like, oh, yeah, it's aliens when you see
Speaker 1: something you don't understand, but also feeling fully free to
Speaker 1: speculate about the idea of aliens because it's an interesting subject.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's fun to think about and and consider
Speaker 1: what the real scientific implications of the existence of aliens
Speaker 1: would be, even though you're always going to try to
Speaker 1: remain skeptical and grounded and not interpret every new piece
Speaker 1: of information about the universe that you can't currently explain
Speaker 1: as an artifact of an alien civilization, right right, And
Speaker 1: in the second was great with this, you know, he
Speaker 1: was always open to exploring those big questions and those
Speaker 1: those those um, you know, the more radical questions, but
Speaker 1: doing so in a balanced way. We're saying, well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk about it. Yes, it could you know,
Speaker 1: aliens certainly could exist, They could have visited the Earth.
Speaker 1: There could be evidence of it in the historical record.
Speaker 1: But what would that look like, what specifically would we
Speaker 1: be looking for? Um? But that is a far hell
Speaker 1: fear approach in my opinion. Yeah, And for me, I
Speaker 1: think it's just like important to just always emphasize the
Speaker 1: lines between you know, factual reporting and intellectual play. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, in in this book in question here Sholowsky
Speaker 1: and say again, they describe Phobos and Demos as quote,
Speaker 1: the chariot horses of the god of war um. And
Speaker 1: I'm unclear on where that comes from exactly than being
Speaker 1: horses as opposed to or in addition to, being the
Speaker 1: sons of Arias. But I think it still checks out,
Speaker 1: you know, whether their war horses or or sons, that
Speaker 1: they're kind of treated like war horses. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: areas could have had some horse sons that would make sense. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so. Another bit that they note in the book,
Speaker 1: and I do want to continue to drive on this
Speaker 1: is the nineteen sixty six book um quote. Thus, if
Speaker 1: we neglect the artificial satellites of Earth, Phobos is the
Speaker 1: only known moon in the Solar System with a period
Speaker 1: of revolution about its planet, which is less than the
Speaker 1: period of rotation of the planet itself. Yeah. So it
Speaker 1: takes Earth's moon roughly a month to orbit the Earth, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: it takes less than a day for Phobos two less
Speaker 1: than a Martian day for Phobos to orbit Mars. I
Speaker 1: think it orbits like three points something times every Martian day,
Speaker 1: and by the very nature Martian day is one rotation,
Speaker 1: so it's kind of it's easy to miss that that
Speaker 1: that point. So I like the way that it really
Speaker 1: drove that home here. So if you're you're clocking in
Speaker 1: at work for your your Martian work day, oh, there
Speaker 1: goes Phobos, and then maybe you could look at Phobos
Speaker 1: again to know when it's time to go home. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: if it wasn't already obvious from the association with Sagan,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear that Shaklovsky was no quack.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's a crater on Phobos named for him,
Speaker 1: Shaklovsky Crater. But he was. He was understandably intrigued and
Speaker 1: confused by the Martian moons for decades for the reasons
Speaker 1: that we've already stated. Um. Sagan in nineteen six described
Speaker 1: alas these ideas concerning uh, the idea of a hollow
Speaker 1: Phobos as quote uh the only serious extant argument supporting
Speaker 1: intelligent life on Mars now to now. Certainly, additional information
Speaker 1: eventually discredited this notion, um. But it's interesting to look
Speaker 1: at how he got there. And the book with Sagan
Speaker 1: contains a fair amount of of math and technical information. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's not it's not you know, certainly not a technical paper,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly not the wide audience work of science
Speaker 1: communication that we often associate with with Sagan Solo books
Speaker 1: and articles to come. But they they break down this
Speaker 1: idea in a great deal again based on data from
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six and before so Schklovsky's idea of a
Speaker 1: hollow Phobos and then eventually tying that to speculation about
Speaker 1: alien life. This is something that is no longer an
Speaker 1: option given what we know about Phobos today, But we're
Speaker 1: exploring this as a historical curiosity of a hypothesis. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: So here's the here's one of the main points here.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read from from the article and uh,
Speaker 1: and I should mention as well that in these some
Speaker 1: of these quotes, um, they'll be using I, and I
Speaker 1: think we're very much that I is referring to Shakoski quote.
Speaker 1: But how can a natural satellite have such a low density.
Speaker 1: The material of which it is made must have a
Speaker 1: certain amount of rigidity, so that cohesive forces will be
Speaker 1: stronger than the gravitational tide forces of Mars, which will
Speaker 1: tend to disrupt the satellite. Such rigidity would ordinarily exclude
Speaker 1: densities below about zero point one Graham's per centimeter to
Speaker 1: the negative third power. Thus, only one possibility remains. Could
Speaker 1: Phobos be indeed rigid on the outside but hollow on
Speaker 1: the inside. A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object. Therefore,
Speaker 1: we are led to the possibility that Phobos and possibly
Speaker 1: Demos as well, maybe artificial satellites of Mars. And if
Speaker 1: so quote they would be artificial satellites on a scale
Speaker 1: al surpassing the fondest dreams of contemporary rocket engineers. Now again,
Speaker 1: this hypothesis is no longer really viable given the evidence
Speaker 1: that we have available to us today. But what what
Speaker 1: a wild and wonderful idea? Yeah and uh, And Chicolosky
Speaker 1: continues to to to back this up and make some
Speaker 1: arguments around it, So I'm gonna roll through some of
Speaker 1: them here. First of all, he says, this idea might
Speaker 1: seem fantastic at first glance, but it demands serious consideration
Speaker 1: because a technologically advanced civilization would certainly be capable of
Speaker 1: manufacturing and launching such an advanced satellite. And if Mars
Speaker 1: did not have any natural moons. The establishment of artificial
Speaker 1: moons would be a greatly important endeavor to any native civilization,
Speaker 1: or presumably, and this is just my reading of it,
Speaker 1: any civilization that took a strong interest in the planet.
Speaker 1: Further More, Shaklovsky says it it would be much easier
Speaker 1: for a Martian presence to launch a satellite h than
Speaker 1: for you know, earthlings to launch the satellite due to
Speaker 1: the reduced Martian gravity, less work is required to get
Speaker 1: something into orbit. And also quote, conceivably, the capture and
Speaker 1: hollowing of a small asteroid might be technically more feasible
Speaker 1: than the construction in orbit of an artificial satellite with
Speaker 1: material brought from the surface. In our future, uh, he says,
Speaker 1: we too might construct such artificial satellites, and if we
Speaker 1: pass on into extinction, well, those satellites might remain. And
Speaker 1: if so, quote, we cannot reasonably assess these possibilities, but
Speaker 1: it does seem conceivable that the lifetime of our artificial
Speaker 1: satellites may exceed the lifetime of our civilization. These satellites
Speaker 1: would then remain as unique and striking monuments to a
Speaker 1: vanished species which had once flourished on the planet. Earth.
Speaker 1: So hypothetically, if Mars had once harbored advanced life forms
Speaker 1: and they developed an advance enough civilization, they might have
Speaker 1: established such artificial satellites have some hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: years ago. So again, to be very clear, it is
Speaker 1: not currently the case that there is evidence to that
Speaker 1: points strongly to an artificial origin for these moons, though
Speaker 1: of course all the interesting mysteries about their natural origins remain.
Speaker 1: But to add to the beauty of this idea, uh,
Speaker 1: there's another fact about Phobos I wanted to add, which
Speaker 1: is that it is thought to have a a very
Speaker 1: thick layer of powdery regulars all around the outside of it,
Speaker 1: So it has, uh, it's it's often thought to be
Speaker 1: very deep. I've read estimates that it's like a hundred
Speaker 1: meters deep, so it's like, you know, over three hundred
Speaker 1: feet deep of this powdery dusty material, this regulars on
Speaker 1: the outside of it, which which gives the possibility that
Speaker 1: if in this alternate universe scenario where these moons were
Speaker 1: artificial creations of ancient technology, you could literally maybe uncover
Speaker 1: surface features of them indicating artificial origin by dusting, by
Speaker 1: moving the dust away, you know, like like the movie
Speaker 1: scene where you wipe the sand off of a sign
Speaker 1: and see the writing on it. Yeah, blow the dust
Speaker 1: off of the the artifact and determine what it is,
Speaker 1: except I guess would be a hundred meters of dust.
Speaker 1: So that be that's that's mega dust. Now. You know,
Speaker 1: we were talking about the difference between, you know, coming
Speaker 1: up with a controversial hypothesis versus just running wild with
Speaker 1: the radical ideas. And it seems it seems like Shaklovsky
Speaker 1: was mindful of this as well, because he points out
Speaker 1: that that there are stronger and less favorable versions of
Speaker 1: this kind of line of thinking. He points out that
Speaker 1: Soviet researcher and someone who's who would later come to
Speaker 1: be known as the father of Russian ufo ology, Felix Ziegel,
Speaker 1: had an even more extreme notion. Uh, perhaps Phobos and demos.
Speaker 1: Zigel argued, perhaps they weren't discovered by the astronomer Herschel
Speaker 1: during the favorable Martian opposition. That means, you know, the
Speaker 1: closeness of Mars to Earth and therefore it's increased um
Speaker 1: visibility via telescope. Perhaps Herschel didn't discover these moons in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty two and instead they were discovered by this
Speaker 1: by a smaller telescope in eighteen seventy seven, because they
Speaker 1: were not there in eighteen sixty two. Rather, they were
Speaker 1: launched after eighteen sixty two by an existing Mars civilization,
Speaker 1: and therefore, uh, were there to be discovered in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven seems implausible, yes, And Shiklowski dismisses this notion
Speaker 1: for several reasons, in part because the naval telescope that
Speaker 1: was actually used to discover the moons, while smaller, was
Speaker 1: still superior to Herschel's, and he contends that if Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Shilklowski is very into this idea that the moons
Speaker 1: could be artificial, but he's like, the only way this
Speaker 1: works is if they were also ancient. There's no way
Speaker 1: that these were just launched in the past few years. Uh.
Speaker 1: And part of that also comes down to, you know,
Speaker 1: we've discussed this in terms before, like one of the
Speaker 1: rules of of observing the cosmos is to realize that
Speaker 1: or to work from the vantage point that we have
Speaker 1: we do not have a privileged place in the universe, uh,
Speaker 1: in space or in time. So the idea that we
Speaker 1: just happened to be looking at Mars one day and
Speaker 1: there were no moons, and then we're looking at it
Speaker 1: years later and there are moons because they were launched
Speaker 1: in the interim. That's just it's just too perfect. It's
Speaker 1: it's just too unlikely. And this is actually one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that Klowski says that that he thinks that,
Speaker 1: you know, another reason that that Phobos could have potentially
Speaker 1: been some sort of an artificial creation. He points out
Speaker 1: that it's eventual crash into Mars means that we are
Speaker 1: in the unlikely position of viewing the moon during its
Speaker 1: final days. Um, I mean, you can argue that we're
Speaker 1: not really talking about days, We're talking about millions and
Speaker 1: millions of years. Uh, it's just astronomically speaking, their days.
Speaker 1: And he argued that it was quote an unlikely but
Speaker 1: not impossible coincidence. Now all of this being said, Chicosi
Speaker 1: also insisted that if ancient Mars was truly this advanced,
Speaker 1: advanced enough to create huge artificial satellites and either construct
Speaker 1: them in orbit, make them out of asteroids, or launched
Speaker 1: them into orbit around Mars, then we will we're bound
Speaker 1: to eventually discover evidence of this civilization, not only you know,
Speaker 1: via the satellites of Mars, but also Mars itself during
Speaker 1: the future exploration of the red planet. And as far
Speaker 1: as the moons themselves go, he said, well, eventually we're
Speaker 1: going to conduct fly bys and the and the images
Speaker 1: that we gain from these, this will shed light on them.
Speaker 1: Will they have special shapes for example? And of course
Speaker 1: the answer would prove to be yes, but also sort
Speaker 1: of no as well, because as we've discussed, like, Phobos
Speaker 1: does have an unusual shape, but it is it a
Speaker 1: special shape? Is it? Is it a shape that that
Speaker 1: screams um artificial construction? Um? I think pretty much everybody
Speaker 1: would argue no. I can't wait to read the articles
Speaker 1: about how no, actually the shape of a Yukon gold
Speaker 1: potato is the perfect shape for for an orbital launch
Speaker 1: platform or whatever. This thing was supposed to be a
Speaker 1: space elevator. And I think that's what some of the
Speaker 1: It's aliens people are saying today, that uh, that that
Speaker 1: Phobos was an ancient Martian space elevator. Once again, there
Speaker 1: is no strong evidence of this. Is I mean, it's
Speaker 1: find a play around, have fun speculating about that. But
Speaker 1: you know, understand the difference between playing with an idea
Speaker 1: and saying like that there's actually strong evidence for it,
Speaker 1: there is not, right, Yeah, because because certainly Schoklovsky ultimately
Speaker 1: contended it while his own hypothesis was scientifically sound at
Speaker 1: the time, though there were some uh, there were some
Speaker 1: arguments and some and certainly some opposition to his ideas
Speaker 1: and people saying, well, I don't think we need to
Speaker 1: go that far and try try to explain phobos um.
Speaker 1: Schoklovsky still acknowledged that future explorations would put his hypothesis
Speaker 1: to the test and that it very well could prove incorrect.
Speaker 1: And if it proved incorrect, though, uh, then it would
Speaker 1: have still served the purpose of forcing people to think
Speaker 1: about the sorts of advanced work that aliens cultures would
Speaker 1: have constructed or could have constructed, and what would remain
Speaker 1: of them, and therefore what we could potentially look for, uh,
Speaker 1: in terms of of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence and extraterrestrial life. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course, one of the signs of a good
Speaker 1: hypothesis is that it makes specific predictions that can be
Speaker 1: tested in the future, right, and uh, you know, and
Speaker 1: again this means nothing to people who want to run
Speaker 1: wild with the idea that Phobos is hollow, and as
Speaker 1: an ancient space elevator, I was looking around briefly and
Speaker 1: I ran across one of these pages and they referred
Speaker 1: to Schklovsky here, but they referred to his quote unquote findings,
Speaker 1: uh as if he had proven, uh, you know, without
Speaker 1: any doubt that Phobos was a hollow artificial satellite, and
Speaker 1: that just that is absolutely not the case, exactly right.
Speaker 1: But coming back to the original thing leading people off
Speaker 1: in this direction, while it's not indication of an artificial origin,
Speaker 1: there is something interesting about the composition of these moons.
Speaker 1: I mean, so like, if you look at Phobos, it
Speaker 1: has weird density. It seems very low density for a
Speaker 1: moon or an object of this type. So that leads
Speaker 1: to other questions like what would be the cause of
Speaker 1: this low density in the moon if it's not, you know,
Speaker 1: a hollow alien spaceship or something, which again it's not,
Speaker 1: and what would be the implications of that low density.
Speaker 1: And this leads us into our next section because we
Speaker 1: have some current hypotheses that hold that the density problem
Speaker 1: is likely solved by in some cases, large spaces within
Speaker 1: Phobos that are not areas that were hollowed out by
Speaker 1: an ancient civilization, but could be due to just the
Speaker 1: the the structural qualities of Phobos itself, the way it
Speaker 1: came together as essentially a big old heap of space junk, right,
Speaker 1: And this ties into something else I was reading, actually,
Speaker 1: so I was looking at a NASA feature from by
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Zubritzky called Mars Moon. Phobos is slowly falling apart. So,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned already, Phobos is doomed to spiral into
Speaker 1: Mars and either crash into it or break up and
Speaker 1: become rings. This will probably not happen for tens of
Speaker 1: millions more years. Actually, the estimates I've seen for this
Speaker 1: or sort of all over the place. Some say this
Speaker 1: will happen in thirty to fifty million years, some say
Speaker 1: fifty million years, some say a hundred million years. Um.
Speaker 1: So I don't think that there's an actual really tight,
Speaker 1: you know limit on that pin down, but it seems somewhere,
Speaker 1: you know, thirty to a hundred million years from now
Speaker 1: it is expected to break apart into a ring or
Speaker 1: crash into Mars. Probably more likely break apart into a ring,
Speaker 1: which is still pretty close in astronomical time. H Yeah, Well, again,
Speaker 1: we're only looking at the end days. Astronomically, from a
Speaker 1: human standpoint, this is so far in the future that
Speaker 1: it's it's it's hard to imagine that these will truly
Speaker 1: be humans that observe it, if humans are around to
Speaker 1: observe it at all. Right, But you remember last time
Speaker 1: how we talked about we were looking at surface features
Speaker 1: of Phobos, and one of the things we talked about
Speaker 1: where the cat scratches, you know, these long grooves along
Speaker 1: the surface of the moon. And so what explains those grooves. Well,
Speaker 1: in this article it quotes a researcher named Terry Herford
Speaker 1: of NASA Goddard who says, we think that Phobos has
Speaker 1: already started to fail, and the first sign of this
Speaker 1: failure is the production of these grooves. And so Zubritsky
Speaker 1: writes that quote. Phobos grooves were long thought to be
Speaker 1: fractures caused by the impact that formed the Stickney Crater.
Speaker 1: Remember the Stickney cra It is that huge crater on
Speaker 1: one face side of Phobos that was named after Angeline Stickney,
Speaker 1: who worked on observing Mars during the eighteen seventies along
Speaker 1: with her husband ASoft Hall. But coming back to this article,
Speaker 1: so the idea was that you had this crater caused
Speaker 1: by a collision with Phobos long ago quote that collision
Speaker 1: was so powerful it came close to shattering Phobos. However,
Speaker 1: scientists eventually determined that the grooves don't radiate outward from
Speaker 1: the crater itself, but from a focal point nearby. More recently,
Speaker 1: researchers have proposed that the grooves may instead be produced
Speaker 1: by many smaller impacts of material ejected from Mars. But
Speaker 1: new modeling by Herford and colleagues supports the view that
Speaker 1: the grooves are more like stretch marks that occur when
Speaker 1: Phobos gets deformed by tidal forces. Now these would be
Speaker 1: tidal forces caused by its close orbit around Mars. Now,
Speaker 1: remember title forces occur when they're is a significant difference
Speaker 1: in gravitational forces felt by different parts of the same object,
Speaker 1: So when something is orbiting close to a huge object,
Speaker 1: it will often experience tidal forces. A very extreme case
Speaker 1: of tidal forces would be the idea of spaghettification, the
Speaker 1: much celebrated way of dying as you go into a
Speaker 1: black hole. As the if you're falling feet first, the
Speaker 1: gradient of gravitational uh forces that you feel as you
Speaker 1: fall into the black hole are so extreme that the
Speaker 1: difference between the forces on your feet and the forces
Speaker 1: on your head would sort of stretch you out like
Speaker 1: a noodle. But in more mundane scenarios, tidal forces are
Speaker 1: also responsible for things like the actual tides right. You know,
Speaker 1: as as Earth in the Moon orbit each other, they
Speaker 1: exert gravitational influences that are not evenly distributed on the
Speaker 1: entire sphere of the other body, but they pull like
Speaker 1: specifically at the at the facing equatorial region of the
Speaker 1: other body, right, And so this results in tides in
Speaker 1: the water on Earth. But also you can see that
Speaker 1: the spheres of Earth in the Moon are also kind
Speaker 1: of the kind of bulge out at the middle around
Speaker 1: the regions where they're they're most pulled on by the
Speaker 1: other body. Now, in the case of Phobos, it was
Speaker 1: once thought that tidal forces should not be strong enough
Speaker 1: to be stretching apart a moon like this, But that
Speaker 1: was when Phobos was assumed to be solid all the
Speaker 1: way through at the time of this writing, and I
Speaker 1: wonder how this idea has matured since then. It's possible
Speaker 1: that there have been some arguments against it in the meantime,
Speaker 1: but at least at this time. In these findings from
Speaker 1: from NASA, Goddard were that the interior of Phobos is
Speaker 1: more likely to be this kind of loose collection of
Speaker 1: rubble is sometimes referred to as a rubble pile, and
Speaker 1: that it's all just sort of barely stuck together and
Speaker 1: then quote surrounded by a layer of powdery regular about
Speaker 1: three hundred and thirty feet or a hundred meters thick
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier, right, So on this model, you've got
Speaker 1: this blanket of dusty powdery regular sort of uh, sort
Speaker 1: of like acting like the bindle sack for a bunch
Speaker 1: of rocks that are just barely loosely held together by gravity.
Speaker 1: So if this model is correct, then there's actually not
Speaker 1: all that much holding the core of Phobos together. It's
Speaker 1: just a bunch of junk kind of loosely stuck together
Speaker 1: by gravity rather than a single massive rocky core, and
Speaker 1: title forces will have a much easier time ripping it
Speaker 1: apart than it would ripping apart something that was more solid.
Speaker 1: And again, mythologically speaking, I think this sounds perfect. The
Speaker 1: idea of the war God's son being this this fast
Speaker 1: and fearful uh creature on the battlefield but ultimately he's
Speaker 1: just this, this wreck, this just partially hollow, falling apart, doomed,
Speaker 1: you know, wraith of a warrior. Now, we've been looking
Speaker 1: a lot at Phobos, and to be fair, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think there's a reason for that. Like a lot
Speaker 1: of the real interest and research and big questions have
Speaker 1: been focused on Phobos. But Demos is interesting too, So
Speaker 1: maybe we should take a quick look at Demos in particular. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Demos is the smaller of the twins. It's nine by
Speaker 1: seven by six point eight miles in size or fifteen
Speaker 1: by twelve by eleven kilometers. It goes around Mars every
Speaker 1: thirty hours. It doesn't have grooves and ridges like Phobos,
Speaker 1: but it has plenty of craters. Uh. And while you
Speaker 1: know normal craters on on other uh, you know, bodies
Speaker 1: are surrounded by ejective from the impact, you know, the
Speaker 1: stuff that gets launched up when that impact takes place.
Speaker 1: Demos is gravity is low enough that impact ejecta achieves
Speaker 1: escape velocity. Uh, So it doesn't fall just immediately fall
Speaker 1: back down. Instead, the debris remains in a ring around
Speaker 1: Dame Us, it seems, and then it's slowly redeposited on
Speaker 1: its surface. Now, we talked in the last episode about how,
Speaker 1: even though Phobos is extremely small for a moon, it's
Speaker 1: so close to Mars that when you look at it
Speaker 1: from the surface, it looks pretty substantial in size. It's like,
Speaker 1: not quite as big as the Moon looks from Earth,
Speaker 1: but like a substantial fraction of it. You can see
Speaker 1: it as a disk and not just a dot. The
Speaker 1: same is not true for Demos. Right from the surface
Speaker 1: of Mars, Damos would appear star like in the sky.
Speaker 1: That's how small it would be. It would just look
Speaker 1: like a star. Uh, you know, it would you know,
Speaker 1: and they would stand out a little bit, but it
Speaker 1: would essentially just look like a star. And that's that's
Speaker 1: interesting because it runs counter intuitive to what we think
Speaker 1: of when we think of a moon. Now, when it
Speaker 1: comes to named craters on Demos, there are only two,
Speaker 1: Swift and Voltaire, chosen for obvious reasons, because, as we
Speaker 1: explored in our first episode, the works of Swift and
Speaker 1: Voltaire were early works that alluded to Mars having two
Speaker 1: moons in advance of those two moons actually being discovered.
Speaker 1: But I was reading in uh In Broca's Brain, the
Speaker 1: book by Carl Sagan Um. He has a whole section
Speaker 1: where he goes into like the naming of Mars. He
Speaker 1: lists a bunch of the different gods in addition to
Speaker 1: the gods that we uh that we discussed, that have
Speaker 1: been associated in different cultures with the planet Mars. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he shares that in addition to Swift and Voltaire,
Speaker 1: he wanted to name a third crater of Demos after Um,
Speaker 1: after Renee Uh Margretti a Belgian surrealist whose paintings featured
Speaker 1: large rocks and suspended in the sky. Or at least
Speaker 1: two of his paintings depicted large rocks suspended in the sky,
Speaker 1: and they reminded Sagan of the Martian moons quote. The
Speaker 1: suggestion was, however, voted down as frivolous. But if you
Speaker 1: look up some of these of these paintings by the
Speaker 1: artists like that, they are really cool. They don't you know,
Speaker 1: they don't look exactly like uh for Boss and Demos,
Speaker 1: but they are the surrealist images of large rock craggy
Speaker 1: boulders suspended in the sky over the ocean or a landscape.
Speaker 1: In one case there's a castle on top of one
Speaker 1: of these boulders. In another case, you see uh crescent
Speaker 1: moon in the sky above it clearly an inspiration for
Speaker 1: Czardas now um and obviously, you know, given it's a
Speaker 1: very small moon, uh. And it is also further away
Speaker 1: from Mars and Phobos. And while Phobos, as we've discussed
Speaker 1: several times already is faded to one day crash into
Speaker 1: the red planet or break up against its power, Demos
Speaker 1: is drifting further away and will one day escape Mars entirely. Uh.
Speaker 1: Though from a mythological standpoint, this I like. I like
Speaker 1: this too, because the this doomed, insane godling who will
Speaker 1: one day earnest freedom, he'll one day escape the awful
Speaker 1: war god uh that that he has served. But he's
Speaker 1: just gonna wander out into the waist of the Solar System,
Speaker 1: perhaps crash into lesser deities or mortals and die by
Speaker 1: bare hands instead, or just wander aimlessly. So that's it's
Speaker 1: kind of perfect in its own way. Now we've talked
Speaker 1: about the idea of missions to the moons of Mars
Speaker 1: in order to study them and perhaps even return a
Speaker 1: sample from them that would allow us to better understand
Speaker 1: where they come from and what they are. There's actually
Speaker 1: another one of these scheduled. It's Japan's Martian Moons Exploration
Speaker 1: or the MMX mission of Jackson, the Japanese Space Agency,
Speaker 1: which is currently scheduled to launch in and perform an
Speaker 1: orbital insertion around Mars in and so it would travel
Speaker 1: to survey both of the planet's moons. And then the
Speaker 1: idea is that it will land on Phobos and collect
Speaker 1: a sample from Phobos to bring back to Earth for study.
Speaker 1: And major scientific objectives of this mission would include determining
Speaker 1: the origin of Phobos and Demos, so possibly answering these
Speaker 1: big questions that we've been talking about all this research
Speaker 1: on today. So are they actually captured asteroids that just
Speaker 1: happened to have these very tidy orbits? Are they the
Speaker 1: result of a giant impact with Mars long ago and
Speaker 1: so forth? And uh? And also we should be able
Speaker 1: to study the history of Mars itself by looking at
Speaker 1: these moons. But as far as space exploration goes, there's
Speaker 1: another interesting thing about the moon Phobos, which is that
Speaker 1: it has often been proposed as a potentially useful base
Speaker 1: of operations for space missions. Yeah, for the same reason,
Speaker 1: Shklovsky outlined it would be advantageous to have a moon
Speaker 1: like Phobos above your Mars. If Phobos did not exist,
Speaker 1: it would be necessary to invent it. And since it
Speaker 1: does exist, it would make a handy base. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so one of the things is that it has been
Speaker 1: proposed as a remote control base of operations for surface
Speaker 1: robots on Mars. So this would eliminate the problem that
Speaker 1: when we want to control rovers and explore Asian vehicles
Speaker 1: on the surface of Mars, there is a large time
Speaker 1: delay between Earth and Mars where we have to wait
Speaker 1: after we transmit a command signal for that signal to
Speaker 1: reach the robot and it performs the operation, and then
Speaker 1: we have to wait to receive feedback, and this can
Speaker 1: be a while while you're just sitting there, you know,
Speaker 1: waiting for your your signal, your remote control signal to
Speaker 1: reach the rover. And so that this can cause a
Speaker 1: lot of slow down and difficulty in these kind of missions.
Speaker 1: If you could get your humans onto the surface of Phobos,
Speaker 1: they could essentially control things operating on the surface of
Speaker 1: Mars remotely in real time. And it would be better
Speaker 1: trying to put humans on the surface of Phobos than
Speaker 1: trying to put them on the surface of Mars itself.
Speaker 1: Because it's a lot easier to get back from the
Speaker 1: surface of Phobos than it is to get back from
Speaker 1: Mars itself. To get off of the surface of Mars,
Speaker 1: you need a powerful rocket to leave the gravity well
Speaker 1: of the planet. Getting off of Phobos would be would
Speaker 1: be a cake walk in comparison. Now, of course, putting
Speaker 1: humans or even just probes on the surface of Phobos
Speaker 1: would still be plenty difficult. And I was reading about
Speaker 1: one possible complication that really fascinated me. This was in
Speaker 1: another NASA press release that I was looking at from
Speaker 1: October of seventeen by Bills Stegerwald and Nancy Jones, and
Speaker 1: it is about research suggesting that solar eruptions may have
Speaker 1: a tendency to electrically charge up the surface of Phobos
Speaker 1: two hundreds of volts quote, presenting a complex electrical environment
Speaker 1: that could possibly affect sensitive electronics carried by future robotic explorers,
Speaker 1: according to a new NASA study. The study also considered
Speaker 1: electrical charges that could develop as astronauts transit the surface
Speaker 1: on potential human missions to Phobos, and they quote a
Speaker 1: researcher named William Farrell of NASA Goddard who says, we
Speaker 1: found that astronauts or rovers could accumulate it's significant electric
Speaker 1: charges when traversing the night side of Phobos, the side
Speaker 1: facing Mars during the Martian day. So why would this happen?
Speaker 1: Why would Phobos turn into a giant Ben Franklin Turkey
Speaker 1: killing jar. Well, fortunately, the electric charge is not quite
Speaker 1: that powerful. I think it is not at the Turkey
Speaker 1: killing jar levels. It seems unlikely that it would be
Speaker 1: in the human injury range at least most of the time,
Speaker 1: but it might be enough to screw up sensors and
Speaker 1: sensitive or delicate electronic equipment. So what gives What would
Speaker 1: cause this? Well, Phobos and Demos both have no atmosphere,
Speaker 1: and they are exposed to solar wind, which is a
Speaker 1: giant stream of charged particles. You can think of it
Speaker 1: as a kind of electric gas that's blowing off of
Speaker 1: the surface of the Sun in every direction at a
Speaker 1: million miles per hour. So solar wind hits the day
Speaker 1: side of Phobos, that would be the side that's facing
Speaker 1: the Sun, and some of the plasma gets absorbed on
Speaker 1: the day side, but then the rest flows around the
Speaker 1: rocky mass of Phobos, and this creates a void of
Speaker 1: solar wind on the night side of Phobos and the
Speaker 1: solar wind is made up of two major types of
Speaker 1: charge particles. You've got electrons, which of course are negative,
Speaker 1: and then you've got ions, pieces of atoms that can
Speaker 1: be positively charged. And the electrons are much lighter than
Speaker 1: the ions. So the article again quotes William Farrell of
Speaker 1: NASA Goddard, who says, quote, the electrons act like fighter jets.
Speaker 1: They're able to turn quickly around an obstacle, and the
Speaker 1: ions are like big, heavy bombers. They change directions slowly.
Speaker 1: This means that the light electrons push in ahead of
Speaker 1: the heavy ions, and the resulting electric field forces the
Speaker 1: ions into the plasma void behind Phobos. According to our models,
Speaker 1: and so the result is that the night side of
Speaker 1: Phobos builds up significant static electricity. Quote. The study shows
Speaker 1: that this plasma void behind Phobos make a to situation
Speaker 1: where astronauts and rovers build up significant electric charges. For example,
Speaker 1: if astronauts were to walk across the night side surface,
Speaker 1: friction could transfer charge from the dust and rock on
Speaker 1: the surface to their space suits. This dust and rock
Speaker 1: is a very poor conductor of electricity, so the charge
Speaker 1: can't flow back easily into the surface. And charge starts
Speaker 1: to build up on the space suits. On the day side,
Speaker 1: the electrically conducting solar wind and solar ultra violet radiation
Speaker 1: can remove the excess charge on the suit. But on
Speaker 1: the night side, the ion and electron densities in the
Speaker 1: trailing plasma void are so low they cannot compensate or
Speaker 1: dissipate the charge build up. And so the team looked
Speaker 1: into this and they found that the static charge could
Speaker 1: reach up to ten thousand volts on some materials that
Speaker 1: would be moving across the surface. And some of those
Speaker 1: materials would include like the teflon suits that that astronauts
Speaker 1: have used in the Apollo lunar missions. And of course
Speaker 1: this leads so you hold up a gigantic static electric
Speaker 1: charge on your space suit and then you go and
Speaker 1: touch something. It's like you know when when you you
Speaker 1: shuffle across the carpet and then use zap your family members.
Speaker 1: They also point out that this is always going to
Speaker 1: be the case when solar wind is blowing onto Phobos,
Speaker 1: but it's going to be especially bad during heavy sun weather,
Speaker 1: such as in the wake of a coronal mass ejection.
Speaker 1: So astronauts on the surface of phobos might need. I
Speaker 1: don't know that they may need mitigation measures for this,
Speaker 1: somehow to avoid accumulating static electricity in this way. I
Speaker 1: was wondering. I was looking it up. Do they make
Speaker 1: those anti static socks I've seen before. I don't know
Speaker 1: if those actually work. Those might be a scam. I've
Speaker 1: never really looked into it. Oh yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess they'd be useful if you're touching a lot of
Speaker 1: electronics and stuff. But if you're just like a kid,
Speaker 1: they seem like a horrible invention. Why would you take
Speaker 1: this gift of static electricity away from them? Oh? I
Speaker 1: know you. You like zapping people, don't you. Um. I
Speaker 1: actually don't zap people as much in intentionally. But one
Speaker 1: thing that my son and I have always enjoyed is
Speaker 1: if the if atmospheric conditions are right, he can go
Speaker 1: down a slide at a playground and he'll build up
Speaker 1: that electric charge on the way down, and then he
Speaker 1: can give me a high five, and when he gets
Speaker 1: to the bottom of the slide and it will be
Speaker 1: what we call an electric high five, because it will
Speaker 1: be an actual static shock to it. So I do
Speaker 1: go if that a lot? Uh, you know, always a
Speaker 1: hit with the kids. That's so beautiful I'm gonna cry.
Speaker 1: But as far as Phobos goes this, this whole scenario
Speaker 1: you just discussed here, it made me think like this
Speaker 1: would be perfect. You have like a Phobos space Western
Speaker 1: kind of like the Sean Connery movie Outlander. Um Outland
Speaker 1: not Outlander. Yes, yes, the Killed TV show, uh, which
Speaker 1: which is also entertaining. But now this is this is uh,
Speaker 1: this is a space Western scenario where you have your
Speaker 1: astronaut and he's been left for dead, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: on the far side of Phobos. But he's not dead.
Speaker 1: So he comes trooping back walking across the waste land
Speaker 1: of Phobos, just building up static electricity with each vengeful
Speaker 1: step until he can get back to the habitat and
Speaker 1: and zap his killers or would be killers. Brutal. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know if the science completely works, but I
Speaker 1: think there's enough science there that you could make it
Speaker 1: work in a science fiction property. Well hey, okay, so
Speaker 1: we love the cool idea of the holo Phobos, but
Speaker 1: there's not good evidence that it's actually true. Put it
Speaker 1: in the science fiction movie. Uh, the there is actually
Speaker 1: evidence that you get this electric build up on Phobos'
Speaker 1: is probably not enough to do the like electric weapon
Speaker 1: idea you want to do, but they put it in
Speaker 1: the science fiction movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you use it
Speaker 1: as a jumping off point to create your your your
Speaker 1: science flavored fantasy. I'm all for that. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: there you habit. We're gonna go ahead and close out
Speaker 1: our look at the moons of Mars. We'll hope you
Speaker 1: and enjoyed this. We enjoyed it, and you know it's
Speaker 1: a great opportunity to bust out some planetary uh information,
Speaker 1: to discuss mythology a bit, and uh, I guess the
Speaker 1: big question is would you like us to continue this
Speaker 1: journey now that we have started it again? Should we
Speaker 1: move on to other moons, other planets? Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: even planets that that don't have moons. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we've I can't remember if we've ever ever done
Speaker 1: like a proper look at the planet Mercury. I know
Speaker 1: we've looked at at Venus a few times, but I
Speaker 1: don't know that we've really looked at Mercury. So may
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that's uh in the cards. Let us know.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from you. In the meantime, If
Speaker 1: you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind, well, you can find us anywhere you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. Go to the Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind Podcasts feed you'll find core science and culture episodes
Speaker 1: of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. On Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 1: we publish artifacts on Wednesday's listener Mail. On Monday's Friday's
Speaker 1: that's when we bust out weird how Cinema. That's our
Speaker 1: time to just discuss some weird movies and sometimes there's
Speaker 1: a little science sprinkled in there. And then on the
Speaker 1: weekends we do a bit of a rerun. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: gotta catch them all huge things. As always to our
Speaker 1: excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 1: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
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