Yes it can. There was an excellent reply above.

Short answer: Phobos is below the Roche limit. It will be ripped apart.

No. Phobos is pretty small, and besides the center of gravity of the Mars-Phobos-Deimos system will not change. There should be no effect on the rest of the Solar System.

Actually, it has a ring, so it might still be doing so.

I have a plan for Venus.

1. We put a bunch of mirrors at the Venus-Sun Lagrange point #1. Reflect light away from Venus. Cool it down until the atmosphere freezes. (This is a 1000 year project.)
2. Once the surface pressure is down to 1 Bar or 14.7 PSI or 101 kPa or whatever, start building chemical plants on the surface to convert those puddles of liquid nitrogen and frozen blocks of CO2 and sulfuric acid into solid minerals, so the air pressure won't rise when the heat is turned back on.
3. Turn the heat back on, by turning some of those mirrors sideways to the Sun.
4. Introduce life. Hydrogen from sulfuric acid and oxygen from CO2 make water. Chemical plants from step 2 have made some fertilizer. Plant some plants. Water them.
5. Bring in the people.

It might take 2000 years total, but we can remake Venus in Earth's image.

We will mine Phobos down to nothing before the breakup. No-one will complain.

It will break up first. After the breakup, atmospheric drag will cause dust to come down in a few thousand years, followed by pebbles and boulders over the next several million years. There could be a nice little ring for a while. (might not be fun for space travelers.)

Please explain. This must be a fiction reference.

> Terraforming Mars

You shouldn't trust novels, movies, or board games for scientific information.

Phobos is the closer moon. It crosses the sky West to East, as seen on Mars. It is inside the Roche limit. It is being torn apart.

Deimos is above the Roche Limit. It crosses the sky, East to West, like our Moon. It will stick around a bit longer.

There is no requirement for moons to be spherical. See Saturn's smaller moons, including Hyperion.

I said something similar over at /r/asteroid about a year ago, about them being captured asteroids, and got refuted by a post-doc who knows more about the Martian moons than I. Now I'm not totally convinced, either way.

Personally, I think we will know a lot more after the JAXA probe brings back samples.

No, there is something called the Roche limit.

Moons inside that limiting distance will be ripped apart. I think only Saturn and Mars has moons inside the limit. You can see what happened at Saturn.

(Edit: There is a much better response about this, higher up. If I read it right, Uranus and Jupiter are also ripping moons apart.)

> It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

We are humans. Of course we will mess with this natural process. In the next 1000 years we will probably mine Phobos until it is a hollow shell, and then turn the interior space into a giant amusement park.

From the mined metals and silicon we could build orbiting power stations, and warm up Mars by beaming microwaves and reflected sunlight to the surface.

Only Phobos is close enough to be torn apart.

This was how Saturn created it rings. There is an up side...

No.

Phobos, where it is, is one of the greatest resources in the Solar System. We can mine the whole thing until there is nothing left, or turn it into an O'Neil space station with a clear conscience, since it will be gone soon anyway, on a geological time scale.

Once we master space-based mining, we can turn Phobos into a fleet of spaceships, or a vast array of silicon solar panels to beam space-based power to Mars, or make mirrors to reflect sunlight onto Mars, to warm the planet to Earth-like temperatures.

On the geological time scale that is sort of medium fast. Rivers change their courses over ~5 million year time scales. Continents split and crash together over ~200 million year time scales. Titan will lose its lakes in about 300 million years.

Mars has changed so little in the last 3 billion years that the Phobos breakup is like a daily headline. Of course, we will land on it in the next few years and probably disassemble Phobos over the next 1000 years, so this all might become moot soon.

At the end the author notes that JAXA is sending a sample return mission to Phobos and Deimos soon, with returned samples scheduled to arrive in 2029.

I do not usually like Live Science as a source, but this article was fairly well written.