Sigh. As long as we've arrived here, I'll note that there is another perplexing problem of this sort: Deimos and Phobos. Particularly Phobos, because it's below synchronous altitude and tidal effects are causing it to move toward Mars, rather than to retreat like our own moon is -- let us be thankful -- doing. Some few tens of millions of years from now, Phobos will either be tidally disrupted into a ring or crash. Both bodies sure look like captured asteroids, but Mars is an unpromising body to perform such a capture into the moons' present orbits. Various alternative explanations have been offered for where they came from, but the whole matter is still very murky. Me, I think they're artificial satellites, and thus on-charter for SeeSat. (Not really) ;-) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 09 2000 - 12:25:45 PDT