Phobos Ridge Mars, the fourth planet of the Solar System. Phobos Ridge Phobos Ridge () is a rocky ridge of sandstones and shales forming the west side of Mars Glacier in the southeast corner of Alexander Island, Antarctica. The coast in this vicinity was first seen from the air by Lincoln Ellsworth on November 23, 1935, and roughly mapped from photos obtained on that flight by W.L.G. Joerg. This ridge was first surveyed in 1949 by the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) and named by the United Kingdom Antarctic Place-Names Committee (UK-APC) for its association with adjacent Mars Glacier, Phobos being the
Stability of the Solar System essentially the distance from sun to earth). These are now known as the Kirkwood gaps. Some asteroids were later discovered to orbit in these gaps, but their orbits are unstable and they will eventually break out of the resonance due to close encounters with a major planet. Another common form of resonance in the Solar System is spin–orbit resonance, where the period of spin (the time it takes the planet or moon to rotate once about its axis) has a simple numerical relationship with its orbital period. An example is our own Moon, which is in a 1:1 spin–orbit resonance