Scientific data gathered about Mars reveals that the Red Planet will lose one of its two small moons. Data shows that Phobos is slowly spiraling towards an inevitable collision with Mars. On the bright side, while Mars is poised to lose Phobos, pieces of the small moon will have a second life and will create a ring that will form around the planet.

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In the Milky Way galaxy, the only planets with rings are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. New planetary study shows that this was not always the case as these giant balls of gas once had orbiting satellites that collided with them and created the rings out of space dust - the residue of the collision.

The inevitable collision of Mars and Phobos will take place about 20 to 40 million years from now. The ring created by the collision will last anywhere from one million to about 100 million years.

The hypothesis was formulated by UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Benjamin Black and graduate student Tushar Mittal. The pair estimated that the cohesiveness of Phobos is insufficient to resist the tidal forces that govern planetary bodies. They then concluded, providing an estimated timeline, that the two cosmic body will finally collide in due time.

In a statement posted on UC Berkeley's website, Black said, "While our moon is moving away from earth at a few centimeters per year, Phobos is moving toward Mars at a few centimeters per year, so it is almost inevitable that it will either crash into Mars or break apart. One of our motivations for studying Phobos was as a test case to develop ideas of what processes a moon might undergo as it moves inward toward a planet."

According to Phys.org, the collision of smaller space bodies into Mars have happened before. Evidence to this is the presence of craters found on the surface of the planet which may have been caused by fragments of space rock that managed to crash into the planet's surface.

TagsMars, Mars moon, Mars Phobos, Phobos, Phobos moon, Phobos collision, Mars collision, mars ring, Mars Phobos Death