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posted by mrpg on Sunday November 18 2018, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the scary dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Walk, don’t run, on the martian moon Phobos. A new study finds that traveling faster than about 5 kilometers per hour on some regions of the Red Planet’s largest satellite could shoot you straight off into space.

Phobos (pictured[*]) is an odd duck among our solar system’s moons. It’s tiny (a fraction of a percent the size of our own moon) and is shaped like a potato; that weird shape draws gravity to different places, depending on where you are.

All these features make Phobos a challenge to travel on, researchers report in Advances in Space Research. In some places, moving any faster than 5 kilometers per hour would be enough to free you from the moon’s meager gravitational pull, sending you off into space where you’d likely be captured by Mars’s gravity and end up orbiting the Red Planet. The fastest you could travel anywhere on Phobos would be about 36 kilometers per hour, or a little faster than a golf cart, the team finds.

[*] Here is a link to the picture.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday November 18 2018, @06:59PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Sunday November 18 2018, @06:59PM (#763579)

    Yep. "Asteroids have so little gravity you can jump/run to orbit" isn't news. That's pretty much why there are sample return missions in space right now.

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