A Japanese spacecraft embarked on a journey to Mars on Tuesday with the goal of exploring the planet’s enigmatic moons and retrieving samples. This unprecedented mission, a collaboration among five global space agencies, aims to land a robotic prospector and a rover on Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two small moons.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, spearheading the ambitious sampling initiative, successfully launched the spacecraft from Tanegashima Island’s main spaceport before dawn. An hour later, officials confirmed the spacecraft’s separation from the rocket’s upper stage, signaling a successful start to the mission.
While NASA has achieved nine successful Mars landings over five decades and China landed a spacecraft in 2021, no previous mission has ventured to Phobos or its companion, Deimos. Additionally, no one has ever collected samples from Mars or its moons. If all goes as planned, samples containing dust, soil, and rocks from Phobos will reach Earth in 2031.
This mission, known as Martian Moons Exploration (MMX), carries a price tag of $812 million ($578 million US) and features a sizable five-ton spacecraft expected to reach Mars by late next summer. The spacecraft will rendezvous with Phobos, ejecting a French-German rover named Idefix, modeled after the white terrier in the Asterix comics.
Upon landing on Phobos, the microwave oven-sized rover, Idefix, will navigate the moon’s low-gravity environment for around 100 days, assessing terrain and potential hazards. The rover’s primary role is to scout for safe locations for the mothership, a stationary lander, to collect samples in late 2028 or 2029.
After spending two hours on Phobos collecting material, the lander will depart, conducting flybys of Deimos before returning to Earth in 2031 to deliver the samples. The mission aims to unravel the mysteries of Mars’s moons’ origins and composition, shedding light on planetary formation and the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system.
The scientific community eagerly anticipates the insights gleaned from this groundbreaking mission, which will inform future Mars exploration efforts. Japan, China, and other space agencies are in a race to unlock the scientific treasures hidden within the Martian system’s rocks and soil, with sample return missions planned for 2031. Japan’s investment in the project stands at $350 million, with contributions from NASA, the French Space Agency, the German Space Agency, and the European Space Agency.