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If all goes well, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will be launching the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission on 20 October.
This ambitious program will study the two moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos. The mission intends to collect a sample of material from Phobos, and return it to Earth by 2031 for scientists to study.
That’s quite a sentence so let’s unpack it.
Why Martian Moons?
Mars has two Moons – the 15km wide Deimos and the 25km wide Phobos, both sons of Mars in classical mythology.
The moons look like obese potatoes and are covered in craters, but they don’t have an obvious origin.
Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed from a giant collision, and Jupiter’s large moons probably formed with the planet, while its smaller moons were later captured by its enormous gravity.
Scientists want to understand how Phobos and Deimos formed – whether it was with Mars, blasted off the planet by an asteroid, or are themselves captured asteroids.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
The MMX mission’s intention is to better understand the formation of the Solar System.
The history of the solar system was much more violent than it is today, with collisions between objects much more common in the past. We only need to look at the number of craters on the Moon or Mercury to see this.
Earth’s weather cleans away this history over time, making it difficult to understand how the solar system came to be by only studying rocks from the ground.
JAXA hopes to tease details out of Mars’ moons about this past by studying rocks from Phobos.
How To Study A Martian Moon
The MMX spacecraft is an enormously ambitious mission.
It will take around one year to get to Mars, where the spacecraft will enter Mars’ orbit and focus most of its attention on Phobos.
Two cameras and a LIDAR (radar but with lasers) ranging system will give detailed information about the surface of Phobos.
An infrared and neutron spectrometer will allow scientists to determine what Phobos is made of and whether it’s the same stuff Mars is made of.
Two more instruments will study the dust and sparse gas around Mars and Phobos.
Credit: JAXA
10 grams of Rock
The main goal of the mission is for the MMX spacecraft to land on Phobos, collect a sample of at least 10 grams of surface material, and return the sample to Earth.
To do this, the spacecraft will first deploy a tiny rover called Idefex.
This 25 kg robot will land on Phobos, collect data about its surface and study how a wheeled vehicle performs in low gravity.
Data from Idefex will inform where and how MMX approaches Phobos.
After an estimated three years at Mars, MMX will deploy its (hopefully full) sample canister back to Earth. About a year later, the canister will land in Australia and be collected for study.
If successful, this will be the first sample return mission from Mars in history.
