Decades ago, a NASA spacecraft swooped past Mars’ smaller moon, Deimos, revealing a smooth, dust-strewn world covered in a thick layer of regolith. Since then, scientists have wondered how the Martian moon got its youthful look compared to its larger counterpart, Phobos. Now, a recent flyby of Deimos may have traced the cause to a violent collision during its early past.
Using images gathered by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera mission, a new study suggests that a single asteroid strike may have dramatically reshaped Mars’ outer moon. The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, show how the impact could have tossed large amounts of…
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