It's escape velocity is about 5.5 m/s, you might be able to sprint fast enough to float away from it. I suspect walking on it would be an exercise in tedium as you took a step and waited while you floated back down to the surface.
Falling a distance of 1 metre would take 25 seconds, and for a step 10cm high it would take 8 seconds.
If you exerted the same force to lift your body upwards as you'd need on earth to rise by 5cm, as in going on tip-toe, you'd jump about 1.5 metres. It would take you well over a minute to land again.
I used to have this dream where I was not quite flying, but if I jumped horizontally and then picked my feet up, it took a very long time to fall back down. That would be, for me, literally "living the dream".
> I suspect walking on it would be an exercise in tedium as you took a step and waited while you floated back down to the surface.
With a surface gravity of 0.003 m/s, even slight twitches by an astronaut would be enough to launch off the surface.
The flip side of that is a sample-return mission (as with OSIRIS-REx) could work with a similar mechanism and manuvering. Though obviously more delta-V is required to get into and get out of Mars orbit.
Any mission visiting would be in danger of perturbing the moon's orbit by shooting off from it, to go home, maybe? I wonder how space agencies would think about that.
I don't think that's a concern. The DART mission was able to alter the orbit of Dimorphos, but that asteroid is only 160 meters in diameter, much smaller than Deimos at 12.4km (mean diameter, it is oblong).
Mass wise, we're talking about Deimos at 1.5x10^15 kg, vs Dimorphos at 5x10^9 kg.
I would expect astronauts landing on Deimos would wear some sort of jet pack that could push them back to the surface in case they accidentally float a bit too far away from it.
