How the Mars Moon Phobos Got Its Grooves

[Judi Lynn]

By Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | November 25, 2018 08:31am ET

- click for image -

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The strange grooves on the surface of the tiny Mars moon Phobos (seen here by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) were made by rolling boulders knocked loose by a giant impact, a new study suggests.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona


The weird linear grooves scoring the surface of the Mars moon Phobos were likely carved by boulders knocked loose by a giant impact, a new study suggests.

That impact created Phobos' most notable feature — the 5.6-mile-wide (9 kilometers) Stickney Crater, which is about one-third as wide as the moon itself.

"These grooves are a distinctive feature of Phobos, and how they formed has been debated by planetary scientists for 40 years," study lead author Ken Ramsley, a planetary scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said in a statement. "We think this study is another step toward zeroing in on an explanation." [The Grooves of Phobos: A Mars Moon Mystery in Pictures]

Mars has two tiny moons — Phobos and Deimos, both of which the Red Planet may have nabbed from the nearby asteroid belt long ago.

More:
https://www.space.com/42504-mars-moon-phobos-grooves-boulders.html

[qazplm135]

1. I'm more interested in...

how it gets its grooves back!

(I'll be here all week).