File talk:MoonsOfMarsImproved3.gif

I literally LOLed. How on earth is jupiter causing moons to fly AWAY from it. What does it have cooties?

Yeah, I was wondering about that as well. Some kind of weird gravity inversion going on. If you look at some of the older versions they even have the *SUN* doing the same thing (also, on a more minor note, almost everything in the solar system orbits the other way round, if we go with the convention of looking "down" on Earth's north pole - ie, anticlockwise... which is in fact the reason for why clocks go the way they do, as they copy sundials, with the sun's apparent clockwise motion across the sky in relation to the earth's actual anticlockwise rotation causing shadows to move the same way)...

I'm not a full expert on orbital dynamics or how giant-planet perturbations of small body motion actually works, but I'm fairly certain the only way it could cause an asteroid belt object to fling inwards would be to first pull it outwards; it would then perform a backwards loop in some way, either around Jupiter, or another outer planet, or just be slowed sufficiently by this that it then ends up falling inwards towards the sun but happily gets caught by Mars instead. Otherwise, they either have to be deflected inwards from the belt by e.g. Ceres (which has easily enough mass to knock objects the size of Phobos and Deimos considerably off-course), or start life as small Centaurs or similar which can be deflected inwards by any of the giants, or larger centaurs/giant-planet trojans, or even their moons... or in fact given the highly eccentric orbits of some centaurs, they might even have crossed Mars' path "naturally" (or been perturbed by any of the other inner planets) and been captured.

There are many ways the Martian moonlets could have ended up in their current orbits, from a likely origin somewhere completely different, but I think we can be pretty confident in saying that the scenario pictured here is NOT the case. 209.93.141.17 04:42, 25 September 2017 (UTC)