Arizona: The United Arab Emirates’ famous Mars spacecraft, Amal, has released extremely clear and close-up images of Mars’ potato-like moon Deimos.
These images were taken from a distance of only 100 km, in which the small moon of Mars, Demos, was clearly visible. The spacecraft has been named Amal, which means ‘hope’ in Arabic. Interestingly, in the last 50 years Amal is the only spacecraft in the world that has passed so close to Demos.
Deimos is a semi-oblique moon with a length of 15 km, a width of 12 km and a thickness of 12 km. The second moon of Mars is Phobos which orbits closer to Mars and has an area of 6000 km.
Amal’s research has shown that Deimos is not actually a stray meteorite that has somehow been captured by the gravity of Mars, but may be a part of Mars itself. Thus our research on demos has to be looked at afresh.
It should be noted that the Amal spacecraft will make further orbits closer to Deimos and thus increase our knowledge.
