Japan is hours away from launching the first mission designed to bring back samples from a Martian moon.
The Martian Moons eXploration probe, or MMX, lifts off Tuesday at 4:41 a.m. Japan time from the Tanegashima Space Center atop an H3 rocket, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It will spend three years studying Phobos, one of Mars’s two small moons, before touching down to collect at least 10 grams of surface material for the trip home.
“The sampling [from] Phobos is of course the world’s first, but it means… this is the first round trip to the Martian system,” MMX project manager Yasuhiro Kawakatsu told AFP.
A small French-built rover called IDEFIX will scout the surface first to find a safe landing spot. NASA is a major partner, contributing a gamma-ray spectrometer, a pneumatic sampling device, and tracking support from its Deep Space Network, and plans to curate a share of the returned material. The samples are expected to reach Earth in 2031, and scientists hope they will settle a long-running debate over whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or debris from a giant impact on Mars.
Source: NASA
