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Possible theory on why Mercury and Venus have no moon, Clues from Earth and Mars moon orbits
Greg Hullender
post Nov 3 2009, 09:55 PM
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Those are all really old though, and predate decent computer simulations of solar system dynamics. I found some promising-sounding papers in the UW library catalog, but none available online. I may drop in and take a look later.

One suggestion I ran across for the origin of Phobos that sounded plausible was that it might originally have been a double asteroid which was split up during a close encounter with Mars. The other piece would have escaped Mars, of course (it's not Deimos), but Phobos' orbit would relatively quickly have been circularized and equatorialized.

Given Phobos' short life, it's quite a coincidence for us to be seeing it, unless Mars captures asteroids this way fairly frequently. But if it happens frequently, why is Deimos the only other satellite of Mars? Is it possible that the widest-separated binary asteroid cannot be captured into an orbit much smaller than Deimos, and hence ALL of them have been, like Phobos, doomed to impact Mars? I can't find any evidence that anyone has tried to work this out.

--Greg
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