The Sesquinary Catastrophe on Deimos Can Reconcile Its Excited Past with Its Dynamically Cool Present

Abstract The origins of the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos are highly debated, and hypotheses include formation from an impact-generated circum-Martian disk and formation from capture of asteroids. With the impact scenario, Deimos (or its precursors) was formed or was pushed out beyond the synchronous orbit of Mars. Moons interior to the synchronous orbit, including Phobos (or its precursors), would tidally evolve, and resonances between these moons could potentially excite Deimos’s orbit. This contradicts Deimos’s present-day orbit of low eccentricity (0.00027) and moderate inclination (1 . ° 8 to the Laplace plane). Tidal dissipation within Deimos is too inefficient for eccentricity damping, and without alternative mechanisms, Deimos’s present-day orbit places strong constraints on the evolution of any inner moons. We propose that a runaway collisional cascade called the “sesquinary catastrophe” acts as a natural barrier that prevents Deimos from having a more excited orbit. Using N -body simulations with collisional fragmentation, we show that if Deimos were more excited, it would undergo a sesquinary catastrophe and break apart into a Roche-exterior debris disk. Using a measure of sesquinary orbital excitation called q , our simulations and previous works suggest that breakup occurs for q ≳ 8 on timescales of ∼10 3 −10 4 yr. If Deimos was destroyed in a sesquinary catastrophe and reaccreted from a (likely collisionally) damped debris disk, it should be a porous sand-pile moon, consistent with its smooth surface. The sesquinary catastrophe can be applied to other Deimos-like planetary moons at q ≳ 8.