Using supercomputer simulations, a team of NASA scientists recently modeled the destruction of an asteroid around Mars to investigate the possible origins of Mars\u2019 two, mysterious moons \u2014 Phobos and Deimos. Since their discovery in 1877 and subsequent investigations by telescopes and Martian spacecraft, scientists have pondered how the two moons came to be, and how they gained their unique, rugged shapes.<\/p>\n
Led by Jacob Kegerreis, the team\u2019s new study revealed that a rogue asteroid may have passed too close to Mars. During its flyby, Mars\u2019 strong gravitational pull would have disrupted, or ripped apart, the asteroid, leading to hundreds of thousands of small rocky fragments orbiting Mars.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
While more than half of the fragments created from the disruption event are believed to have been ejected away from Mars, those trapped within the planet\u2019s orbit would have continued to collide, creating more debris. After these collisions stopped and the fragments settled into a ring around Mars, the material within the rings likely began clumping together, creating the Phobos and Deimos we know today.<\/p>\n
This theory was tested by Kegerreis et al.\u2019s supercomputer models, which explored hundreds of different flyby simulations, each varying the asteroid\u2019s size, spin, speed, and distance from Mars during the disruption event. The team employed two different computing codes for their simulations: a high-performance, open-source computing code called SWIFT (used to model the disruption event), and another computing code for modeling the orbits of the debris produced from the disruption event. Each computing code utilized Durham University\u2019s advanced computing systems in the UK.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n