The United Arab Emirates’ space probe Hope studying planet Mars, made a fly-by of Mars’s small moon Deimos on 10 March.
During the fly-by, the probe took the first high-resolution images of the farside of Deimos. The observations add weight to the theory that Deimos formed together with Mars, rather than as an asteroid that was captured in the planet’s orbit.
Hope's science lead Hessa Al Matroushi recalls the excitement when the first images streamed in, looking down at the 12.4-kilometre-wide body.
“Mars was in the background — and that was just mind-blowing, honestly,” says Al Matroushi, who is at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
She reported the results at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna on 24 April.
Read more about Deimos from Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01422-1
Photos and data gathered by Hope (officially The Emirates Mars Mission) are available at https://www.emiratesmarsmission.ae