Quixote wrote:
Iron, well a number of the asteroids in the belt are mostly iron, while others have very little. is there a better explanation for that?
Show me some large (as in comparable to Ceres, for example), near perfectly spherical iron-nickel asteroids that are more than 99.99% free metal and I'll take the idea of a planetary explosion more seriously. A planet large enough to have a moon the size of mars tidally locked in orbit would likely have a lot of free metal in the inner core that would be molten following such an event.
Large amounts of molten iron would adopt a spherical configuration pretty readily. Also, being the densest (therefore exerting the greatest gravitational field) part of the parent planet, I'd expect it to mop up a lot of the immediate debris too, so they'd be pretty damn large and hard to miss.
I can't think of a single known asteroid that fits the bill. The mass and inertia of such a body would preclude it being thrown in some wildly eccentric orbit never to be seen again.
Mars' orbit is rather tame(r) now, but it's still pretty elliptical. Remember that over time, the influence of other worlds tends to smooth out a planet's orbit, making it more circular.
Tell that to Mercury and Pluto ;-)
As for two belts, one further in than Mars and one further out, you've missed it a bit: Mars isn't in its original orbit; collisions with that much debris moving that quickly knocked it out of its orbit into a lower one. The belt is at the original distance. The asteroids are the bits that weren't moving quickly enough to shift orbit significantly, except over the eons.
The physics don't add up. The most massive parts of the planet would be near the core; these would be the ones hardest to move and also the ones with the most obvious compositional make up.
Unless of course, the force of the planetary explosion was so vast that it disintegrated it completely into small (no larger than say 100km) fast moving pieces.
Of course, the energy sufficient to do this would also obliterate any satellites. And I don't mean scarring them and ripping away their atmospheres. I mean total obliteration on the same scale as the parent planet.