"The collision that almost destroyed Deimos": how a 300-meter asteroid completely reshaped the Martian moonPhoto by Th2city Santana on Pexels
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"The collision that almost destroyed Deimos": how a 300-meter asteroid completely reshaped the Martian moon

Meteored Portugal27 August 2026 at 15:20

An international team led by the University of Bern discovered that Deimos, Mars' smallest moon, may have been drastically reshaped by a single collision with an asteroid approximately 300 meters in size. Dr. Sabina Raducan, the study's lead author, explains that the depression near the south pole and the uniform layer of regolith that makes the moon appear smoother may have a common origin: an ancient impact that nearly destroyed the Martian moon. The research used advanced simulations run on high-performance computing clusters, representing one of the few codes capable of performing this type of modeling.

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