The Amazing World

Image Courtesy : NASA Mars' moon Phobos is slowly being pulled apart by tidal forces and scientists expect it to be destroyed in 30 to 50 million years, a new study has found. The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos is closer to the planet than any other in the solar system, orbiting at only 6,000 kilometres above the surface and being pulled closer by two metres every hundred years. Scientists said Phobos has already begun showing signs of its eventual demise, with imagery showing grooves in the moon's surface that indicate stress marks caused by the forces produced by the gravitational pull between Mars and the moon. "We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves," said Terry Hurford of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre. The grooves were originally thought to be fractures from an asteroid impact, as Phobos was more-or-less solid the entire way through, meaning that ...

Halloween “asteroid” is most likely a dead comet. The large space rock that zipping past Earth this Halloween is most likely a dead comet that bears an eerie resemblance to a skull,  NASA says . A story at JPL’s website late Friday reported: Scientists observing asteroid 2015 TB145 with NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun. The belated comet has also been observed by optical and radar observatories around the world, providing even more data, including our first close-up views of its surface. Asteroid 2015 TB145 will safely fly by our planet at just under 1.3 lunar distances, or about 302,000 miles (486,000 kilometers), on Halloween (Oct. 31) at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT, 1700 UTC). The first radar images of the dead comet were generated by the National Science Foundation’s 305-meter (1,000-foot) Arecibo Observa...