Mangalyaan Moonshine

Mars has two moons orbiting it. Recently, a newborn third satellite joined them—Mangalyaan from India.

ISRO, the national space agency, has shared small footage on its social networking site captioned: “The larger of the two Martian moons, Phobos, is seen travelling west to east over Mars in its typical orbit.”

For 20 days, ISRO’s Mars Orbiter has been shooting the other two satellites. On Tuesday it sent pictures of Phobos — the larger one. Phobos has hundreds of craters of varying sizes that can be seen from the Viking-1 orbiter.

The images were taken from a height of 66,275 km above the Red Planet. Phobos, along with another natural satellite of Mars, Deimos, was discovered in 1877. Phobos, which is 27 by 22 by 18 km in diameter orbits the red planet three times a day.

Phobos is getting closer to Mars at a rate of 1.8 m every hundred years. It is expected to crash into the red planet in 50 million years or break up into a ring, according to the US national space agency.

But don’t worry even if the secret is out of the bag on your social media page. You won’t be around then—hopefully.

Image Credit: Nesnad / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Image Reference: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mars_Orbiter_Mission_-_India_-_ArtistsConcept.jpg