The spaceship Hope sent back to Earth the sharpest images ever taken by Demothe smallest satellite of the planet Mars.

Hope launched on July 20, 2020 from its space center Tanegashima in Japan, as part of the maiden interplanetary mission of the United Arab Emirates, the first from a country in the Arab world.

The images were taken from a distance of about 110 kilometers from Deimos, one of its two satellites Red Planet (Fear is the bigger of the two).

It is the first time since the Viking mission to Mars (1977) that a spacecraft has come this close to Deimos, Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) officials said today during the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). in Vienna.

Thanks to the EXI camera that provides high-resolution color images, Hope has revealed the “dark side” of Mars’ smallest satellite. Deimos is about 23,000 kilometers from the Red Planet and scientists are still unsure of its origin.

“We are not sure of the origin of either Fear or Deimos,” noted EMM mission manager Hesa ​​al-Matroushi. According to the most widespread theory, “these are asteroids captured in the orbit of the Red Planet”.

However, Hope’s observations reinforce an entirely different theory: Deimos was born from the bowels of Mars. The rock is said to have been part of the Red Planet, detached by a violent impact, and subsequently captured in the orbit of Mars.

Commenting on the images of Deimos on Twitter, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, wrote in his post that the satellite was part of Mars, from which it “separated millions of years ago”.

The Hope spacecraft will continue observing Deimos throughout 2023 to collect more data, the United Arab Emirates space agency said, which has decided to extend the mission for another year.

The richest Gulf country also aspires to send an unmanned robotic vehicle to the Moon in 2024.