Mars has 2 moons: Phobos and Deimos.

Quick Scoop

  • Mars has two small, irregularly shaped moons named Phobos and Deimos.
  • They are much smaller and less round than Earth’s Moon, more like lumpy asteroids.
  • Phobos is the larger and orbits very close to Mars; Deimos is smaller and farther out.
  • Both moons likely began as asteroids that Mars captured with its gravity, according to many scientists.

In many kids’ space books and videos today, Mars is introduced as “the Red Planet with two tiny potato-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos.”

A bit more detail

  • Names and meaning: Phobos means fear and Deimos means dread , tied to the war god Mars/Ares in mythology.
  • Size: Phobos is roughly 14–17 km across; Deimos is only about 7–12 km across, depending on how it’s measured.
  • Future of Phobos: It orbits so close that it is slowly spiraling inward and may eventually break apart into a ring or crash into Mars in tens of millions of years.

TL;DR

  • Mars moons count: 2 (Phobos and Deimos).
  • Both are tiny, cratered, and probably captured asteroids.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.