GRAB IT AND RUN! A spacecraft has launched from Japan headed for Phobos, the bigger of Mars’s two moons, where it will try to scoop up some moon dust and fly it back to Earth, the BBC reported. If it works, it’ll be the first time ever a sample from Mars or its moons is analysed in labs here on Earth.
The mission is called Mars Moons Exploration (MMX) and it’s led by Japan’s space agency, JAXA. It’s due at Phobos in August 2027. It’ll study the smaller moon, Deimos, on the way in, then drop a small rover onto Phobos to scout a landing spot before the main spacecraft touches down itself, deploys a robotic arm and two samplers, and packs the dust into a capsule.
That capsule is due to land in the Woomera desert of South Australia in 2031. The haul is tiny, just 10 grams. “You don’t need to have kilos back from a surface in order to do science. So it’s worth every gram,” said Dr Chrysa Avdellidou of Leicester University, who is working with the mission.
Landing won’t be easy. Phobos is only about 20km (12 miles) across, shaped like a space potato, and has barely any gravity of its own while sitting right next to a much bigger planet. “There hasn’t yet been a successful mission to go to Phobos and bring a bit back to Earth,” said Prof Sara Russell of the Natural History Museum, the mission’s deputy for sample analysis.
The big question it could settle: were Mars’s moons blasted out of the planet by a giant impact, or are they wandering asteroids Mars captured? Russell says the chemistry should make the answer “pretty much immediately obvious.” And because Phobos orbits so close, the sample may even contain grains of Mars itself.
Why it matters: NASA and ESA’s own Mars Sample Return mission has been effectively cancelled after US Congress halted its funding, and China plans its own Mars sample mission in 2028, also aiming for a 2031 return. Live Science called MMX the world’s first round-trip mission to the Mars system.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
Sources: BBC News, Live Science
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