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Does Mars have rings?


Waspie_Dwarf

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Mars might already be building rings from its moons

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In a few million years, Mars’s moon Phobos will be shredded into pieces that will settle into a flat ring like Saturn’s. But bits of Mars’s two moons may already be circling the Red Planet, some of it in the form of nascent rings.

Astronomers have long thought it was possible for Mars to be encircled by rings made of bits of rock kicked up from its moons Phobos and Deimos, but no one had ever observed them. This may be because the rings lie in planes not easily viewed from Earth or space telescopes – or perhaps they aren’t there at all.

arrow3.gif  Read More: New Scientist

 

Edited by Waspie_Dwarf
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Makes you wonder, if some of the Mars missions that have failed could have been struck by some of the orbiting material forming the ring system. Perhaps mission planner could factor this in and approach Mars on a different vector?

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3 hours ago, EBE Hybrid said:

Makes you wonder, if some of the Mars missions that have failed could have been struck by some of the orbiting material forming the ring system.

Many factors have been responsible for the loss of Mars missions. The vast majority (if not all) have been explained. None have been caused by impacts with dust particles from a potential Martian ring.

3 hours ago, EBE Hybrid said:

 Perhaps mission planner could factor this in and approach Mars on a different vector?

There is simply no need. The very fact that orbiting spacecraft can not prove beyond doubt that such a ring exists means that, if it does exist, it must be very tenuous. The threat to a spacecraft is pretty much zero.

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Will all the  space junk encircling us eventually even out and create an artificial Earth-ring?

I suppose given enough time and all...?

Edited by taniwha
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the planetary dust are simple  remains of another planet which existed between mars and jupiter, ceres downgraded to a dwarf planet. Saturn's ring was also formed by the remains of this planet .

Edited by qxcontinuum
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Interesting post! One would imagine that millions of years in the future, many planets in our system would have undergone a radical transformation by then. We are living in, and are seeing, an infinitesimally small snap shot of one moment of the evolution of the universe...

Edited by Silent Trinity
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  • 4 weeks later...

Does Mars Have Rings? Not Right Now, But Maybe One Day

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As children, we learned about our solar system's planets by certain characteristics -- Jupiter is the largest, Saturn has rings, Mercury is closest to the sun. Mars is red, but it's possible that one of our closest neighbors also had rings at one point and may have them again someday.

That's the theory put forth by NASA-funded scientists at Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, whose findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience. David Minton and Andrew Hesselbrock developed a model that suggests that debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping together to form a moon.

arrow3.gif  Read More: NASA

 

Edited by Waspie_Dwarf
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