Update: The launch date of this mission has been moved to 2026.
A piece of Mars鈥檚 biggest moon is coming back to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is sending a spacecraft to Phobos to examine its surface and bring back samples that should help researchers figure out exactly how this strange moon formed.
The Martian Moons eXploration聽(MMX) mission is slated to launch from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan in September 2024, arriving in orbit around Mars about a year later. It will then adjust its orbit to stay near Phobos, making observations of the smaller moon Deimos along the way.
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Once it arrives, the spacecraft has a variety of instruments on board to observe the surface of Phobos from afar, including lidar to make a detailed topographical map, spectrometers to measure the composition of the surface and devices designed to study the space around both Phobos and Deimos.
杏吧原创s and engineers on the ground will use that data to select a spot on Phobos where MMX will land to take dust samples and drop off a small rover called IDEFIX. The spacecraft will then head back towards Earth, and if all goes well it will arrive home in 2029.
The main goal of all of this is to finally determine how Phobos and Deimos formed. 鈥淲hen the moons were first discovered and observed by spacecraft, one of the things that was most apparent is that they looked a heck of a lot like asteroids, both in their morphology and their surfaces,鈥� says at NASA鈥檚 Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, a collaborator on the mission. 鈥淚mmediately it seemed like they were both asteroids that were captured by Mars, but once you look at their orbits, that doesn鈥檛 make a lot of sense.鈥�
Both moons have a circular orbit around the Martian equator, which would be consistent with them either being remnants from the formation of Mars itself or having been created in a large impact, like Earth鈥檚 moon. But it would be difficult for captured asteroids to adopt such orbits, leaving their actual origins a mystery. 鈥淚 feel very optimistic that MMX is going to solve this mystery, although you never know 鈥� when you get more data you always open up more questions,鈥� says Fraeman.
