First photo of Mars' strangely shaped moon

The United Arab Emirates' Hope space probe has captured the first high-resolution images of Mars' moon Deimos.

Hope, officially known as the Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) , made its flyby of Mars' moon just over a month ago.

Hope flew past Deimos and captured strange shapes and pockmarks on the surface of the Martian moon. (Photo: Emirates Mars Mission).

Hessa Al Matroushi, EMM's chief scientist, said the team was excited by the first images of the 12.4km-wide Moon. Al Matroushi's team unveiled the images on April 24 at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna.

Like Earth's Moon, Deimos is tidally locked to its planet, meaning that any observations from low orbit or the surface of Mars have so far only seen one side of the Moon.

The moon Deimos was formed from the same material as the Red Planet, according to new observations. (Photo: Emirates Mars Mission).

But compared to all previous missions to explore the Red Planet, Hope has an unusually long and high orbit, reaching more than 40,000km above the Martian surface at its highest point.

It is this orbit that allows the probe to look at Deimos from above and take pictures of the moon's never-before-seen side, Al Matroushi explained. However, EMM cannot yet take pictures of another Martian moon, Phobos, because it lies less than 10,000 km above the surface of the Red Planet, below the lowest point of the probe's orbit.

During the March 10 flight, the Hope mission team used all three instruments on board to record readings ranging from infrared to ultraviolet light from Deimos.

Image of the Martian Moon at the spacecraft's closest approach. (Photo: Emirates Mars Mission).

The relatively flat spectrum shows that this moon has surface material similar to Mars, not the carbon-rich rocks commonly found in asteroids. This means that Deimos was formed from the same material and at the same time as Mars, and not a stray asteroid caught in the Red Planet's gravity.

Hope is a 1.35-ton, $200 million spacecraft launched by a Japanese rocket in July 2020 and arriving at Mars in February 2021.

The spacecraft regularly observed the Martian atmosphere, and its main scientific goal was to study seasonal changes in the atmosphere and weather patterns on the Red Planet. When the mission was complete, while fuel was still available, the team used the engine to send Hope into a trajectory that passed by Deimos multiple times to study the Martian moon in more detail.