Two Possible Orbital Histories of Phobos

Abstract The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, have orbits that are close to the Martian equator, indicating their formation from a circumplanetary disk. Phobos is currently migrating toward Mars due to tidal dissipation within the planet and may be disrupted into a ring in a few tens of Myr. The past evolution of Phobos is not fully understood, with one possibility being that Phobos formed in the early solar system just interior to the synchronous orbit and migrated inward over several Gyr. Alternatively, Phobos may be the most recent product of an ongoing Martian ring–moon cycle that lasted several Gyr but formed Phobos only 100 Myr ago at the fluid Roche limit. Here we use numerical integrations to simulate the past evolution of Phobos in both of these scenarios and test whether Phobos’s small eccentricity and inclination are consistent with either of these hypotheses. During its tidal evolution, Phobos crossed multiple resonances with both the rotation of Mars and the apparent motion of the Sun, requiring detailed numerical modeling of these dynamical events. Furthermore, Phobos crossed resonances with Deimos, which can affect the orbit of Deimos. We find that both the ancient Phobos hypothesis and the ring–moon cycle are fully consistent with the present orbit of Phobos, with no currently available means of distinguishing between these very different dynamical histories. Furthermore, we find that Deimos is affected by weak chaos caused by secular resonances with the planetary system, making the eccentricity of Deimos an ineffective constraint on the past migration of Phobos.