Yes, probably. Deimos particularly has a lot going for it and has been put forward several times as a destination for humans, with the most detailed proposal by Lockheed Martin in their "Stepping Stones to Mars" program.
First - Deimos interestingly has a South pole that is almost permanently shadowed - amongst the coldest places in the inner solar system. This also it a place where you are sheltered from solar flares - and natural cooling e.g. for rocket fuel that needs to be kept at cryogenic temperatures (also ideal for infra red observation).
And close to those places you have a site of continuous summer sunlight and continuous visibility to Mars.
You also have permanent line of sight communication with Earth nearly all the year except when Mars is behind the sun.
Deimos is almost synchronous with the surface of Mars - and tidally locked to Mars - so that means that you can telerobotically explore Mars from Deimos and you are over any particular area of Mars for hours at a time and if you have your base in the right place, can have permanent line of sight access to the surface of Mars.
A typical site on Mars is visible from Deimos for 45% of the time, and 97.5% of Mars is directly accessible via telepresence.
Slide presentation: One Possible Small Step Toward Mars Landing: A Martian Moon - and more details: Page on caltech.edu
Spaceshow talk about the idea DrJosh Hopkins on David Livingston's Space Show
Concept map: Rationale for Human Exploration of Phobos and Deimos
The Scientific Rationale for Robotic Exploration of Phobos and Deimos : Scott L. Murchie
Deimos is also an asset for mining - it's not known for sure yet, but may have large deposits of water ice. If so that's of great value for fuel - and the delta v budget is such that it's actually one of the easier places to mine ice to return to LEO. As well as use in Mars orbit.
David Kuck in 1997 suggested starting up a Deimos Water Company to supply Earth orbit with water from Deimos. The Kuck mosquitoes are small unmanned craft that drill into Deimos and extract water from below the surface, use part of it as fuel to transport the rest back to Earth.
See also Mining Phobos and Deimos
This makes it a project that could be commercially viable, unlike Mars surface, through sale of ice to LEO.
You could later use Deimos to build Stanford Torus type settlements in Mars orbit. It has a mass of 1.48 * 10^12 metric tons, which at 15 metric tons per square meter is enough to make Stanford Tori with about 100,000 square kilometers of living area.
So, if you were to mine the whole of Deimos - not suggesting we do - but if we do - that's cosmic radiation shielding for roughly the size of Iceland, larger than Scotland, or Norway, more than twice the size of Switzerland, which could be useful for Mars orbital colonies.
In terms of US states, that's about the size of Oregon or Colerado
That's just the outermost hull which you can build on top of - and larger habitats might well have multiple "shells" within it - so that's a lower bound on the total land are you could create from Deimos using it for cosmic radiation shielding.
Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths
Whether we should do it or not is another matter. Is it right to, for instance, entirely demolish Deimos to make human settlements?
But mining Deimos - partially anyway - is far less of an ethical issue that colonizing the surface of Mars - because you would not be contaminating Mars with Earth life.
It's similar to mining the Moon - probably (of course needs detailed assessment). Where again - you get some people asking if it is ethically right to mine the Moon also - especially for proposals to strip mine eventually the entire surface of the Moon - for helium 3.
Scratching the Surface: The Ethics of Mining Helium-3
So similarly - is it right to mine Deimos? If so - how much and - is it right to go so far as to demolish the moon for resources eventually? You are likely to get many different points of view on these issues.
Deimos may also be of interest for studying past life on Mars - through study of impact material from ancient Mars buried deep on Deimos and cryogenically preserved since the early solar system. But, without an atmosphere, it's similar to the Moon, contamination around a base would be localized to the vicinity of the base.
I'd say that we should study Deimos first using robots without humans to confirm these conclusions and find out what is there. But on the face of it, based on our undrestanding so far, it does seem a suitable place for off world settlement and maybe eventually colonization.
It's not the easiest place to get to for the very first missions to Mars because you have an extra 2.7 km/second to get into low Mars orbit. So I expect first human missions to Mars be telerobotic exploration missions to Mars capture orbit, following the HERRO proposals, or to be fly bys or double flyby missions like Robert Zubrin's "Double Athena" (or Inspiration Mars but that one has some major issues because of the extremely high return velocity when it gets back to Earth and gives a far shorter time in telepresence communication with Mars).
But for later missions - it isn't that much harder to get to than Mars capture - and it is also easy to get back to Earth again. And - at least small scale use of Deimos for building settlements there seems reasonably uncontroversial - certainly far less of an ethical minefield than introducing Earth life to Mars. And also mining it for ice on a small scale compared to volume of Deimos would provide large amounts of ice for LEO and Mars orbit.
First - Deimos interestingly has a South pole that is almost permanently shadowed - amongst the coldest places in the inner solar system. This also it a place where you are sheltered from solar flares - and natural cooling e.g. for rocket fuel that needs to be kept at cryogenic temperatures (also ideal for infra red observation).
And close to those places you have a site of continuous summer sunlight and continuous visibility to Mars.
You also have permanent line of sight communication with Earth nearly all the year except when Mars is behind the sun.
Deimos is almost synchronous with the surface of Mars - and tidally locked to Mars - so that means that you can telerobotically explore Mars from Deimos and you are over any particular area of Mars for hours at a time and if you have your base in the right place, can have permanent line of sight access to the surface of Mars.
A typical site on Mars is visible from Deimos for 45% of the time, and 97.5% of Mars is directly accessible via telepresence.
Spaceshow talk about the idea DrJosh Hopkins on David Livingston's Space Show
Concept map: Rationale for Human Exploration of Phobos and Deimos
The Scientific Rationale for Robotic Exploration of Phobos and Deimos : Scott L. Murchie
Deimos is also an asset for mining - it's not known for sure yet, but may have large deposits of water ice. If so that's of great value for fuel - and the delta v budget is such that it's actually one of the easier places to mine ice to return to LEO. As well as use in Mars orbit.
David Kuck in 1997 suggested starting up a Deimos Water Company to supply Earth orbit with water from Deimos. The Kuck mosquitoes are small unmanned craft that drill into Deimos and extract water from below the surface, use part of it as fuel to transport the rest back to Earth.
See also Mining Phobos and Deimos
This makes it a project that could be commercially viable, unlike Mars surface, through sale of ice to LEO.
You could later use Deimos to build Stanford Torus type settlements in Mars orbit. It has a mass of 1.48 * 10^12 metric tons, which at 15 metric tons per square meter is enough to make Stanford Tori with about 100,000 square kilometers of living area.
So, if you were to mine the whole of Deimos - not suggesting we do - but if we do - that's cosmic radiation shielding for roughly the size of Iceland, larger than Scotland, or Norway, more than twice the size of Switzerland, which could be useful for Mars orbital colonies.
In terms of US states, that's about the size of Oregon or Colerado
That's just the outermost hull which you can build on top of - and larger habitats might well have multiple "shells" within it - so that's a lower bound on the total land are you could create from Deimos using it for cosmic radiation shielding.
Asteroid Resources Could Create Space Habs For Trillions; Land Area Of A Thousand Earths
Whether we should do it or not is another matter. Is it right to, for instance, entirely demolish Deimos to make human settlements?
But mining Deimos - partially anyway - is far less of an ethical issue that colonizing the surface of Mars - because you would not be contaminating Mars with Earth life.
It's similar to mining the Moon - probably (of course needs detailed assessment). Where again - you get some people asking if it is ethically right to mine the Moon also - especially for proposals to strip mine eventually the entire surface of the Moon - for helium 3.
Scratching the Surface: The Ethics of Mining Helium-3
So similarly - is it right to mine Deimos? If so - how much and - is it right to go so far as to demolish the moon for resources eventually? You are likely to get many different points of view on these issues.
Deimos may also be of interest for studying past life on Mars - through study of impact material from ancient Mars buried deep on Deimos and cryogenically preserved since the early solar system. But, without an atmosphere, it's similar to the Moon, contamination around a base would be localized to the vicinity of the base.
I'd say that we should study Deimos first using robots without humans to confirm these conclusions and find out what is there. But on the face of it, based on our undrestanding so far, it does seem a suitable place for off world settlement and maybe eventually colonization.
It's not the easiest place to get to for the very first missions to Mars because you have an extra 2.7 km/second to get into low Mars orbit. So I expect first human missions to Mars be telerobotic exploration missions to Mars capture orbit, following the HERRO proposals, or to be fly bys or double flyby missions like Robert Zubrin's "Double Athena" (or Inspiration Mars but that one has some major issues because of the extremely high return velocity when it gets back to Earth and gives a far shorter time in telepresence communication with Mars).
But for later missions - it isn't that much harder to get to than Mars capture - and it is also easy to get back to Earth again. And - at least small scale use of Deimos for building settlements there seems reasonably uncontroversial - certainly far less of an ethical minefield than introducing Earth life to Mars. And also mining it for ice on a small scale compared to volume of Deimos would provide large amounts of ice for LEO and Mars orbit.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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