Japan is preparing to send a spacecraft on a five-year round trip to Phobos, with the goal of returning the first-ever rock and soil samples from a moon of Mars. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to launch the Martian Moons Exploration Mission, or MMX, on Tuesday, Breitbart reported.
Project manager Kawakatsu Yasuhiro said the mission could shed light on how the solar system formed, offer clues about the origins of life, and perhaps lay groundwork for using Phobos as a staging point for a crewed trip to the Martian surface.
“Despite their potential importance, Martian moons have never been fully investigated. They are known as the most important unclimbed mountains in the solar system,” Kawakatsu said.
A small, fast and battered target
Phobos is the larger of Mars’ two moons, alongside Deimos. Both are tiny next to Earth’s Moon and whip around the planet at close range and high speed. Phobos measures just 17 miles across at its widest point and circles Mars three times a day. Nearly half its surface is taken up by a single enormous crater, Stickney, left by a meteor impact that came close to shattering the moon.
Those features make a Phobos landing a serious challenge. Russia tried four times between 1988 and 2011 to send probes to the moon. Only Phobos-2 reached Martian orbit, and it suffered a catastrophic computer failure in March 1989 when it was agonizingly close to touching down.
NASA instrument aims to settle a 1877 question
MMX is led by JAXA with support from NASA, which is supplying an instrument called the Mars-moon Exploration with Gamma Ray and Neutrons detector, or MEGANE. The device, built by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, could help answer where Phobos and Deimos came from.
Since the moons were first observed in 1877, astronomers have debated whether they were born from material torn off Mars itself or were wandering asteroids caught by the planet’s gravity.
“What are these little space potatoes? We can’t explain Phobos or Deimos right now. They shouldn’t exist, but they do. They’re super weird, they’re super small and they’re super puzzling,” Dr. Abigail Fraeman of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told CNN on Monday.
Fraeman noted that spacecraft and rovers sent to Mars have gathered plenty of data on the two moons, but none of it fits any single origin hypothesis cleanly.
MEGANE could break the stalemate by measuring neutron and gamma ray energy from Phobos’ surface, producing an elemental analysis that might show whether the moon is made of the same stuff as Mars. The comparison is something like a DNA test for a moon.
“If you had a giant impact, what happens is the materials get very hot, and you will cook off these volatile elements. In contrast, a lot of asteroids that we see have higher abundances of these volatile elements,” said planetary scientist David Lawrence of APL.
A toy rover, a beer-case lander and two drops
The spacecraft will first set down a tiny rover named Idefix, built by the German Aerospace Center and France’s National Center for Space Studies. The toy-sized rover will help identify the best landing spot for the mission’s main lander, which is small itself, about the size of a case of beer.
Phobos’ gravity is so weak that planners intend to release the lander from less than 350 feet above the surface and let it bounce gently down. The plan calls for two drops on opposite sides of the moon, because its dark side appears to have a notably different composition from its light side.
The lander carries an American-built system that gathers surface dust with pressurized gas, along with a Japanese system that can dig about an inch into the moon to collect samples. Material gathered from multiple spots could help address lingering questions about the origins of life in the solar system and whether Mars ever hosted life. If Phobos is a chunk of Mars flung into orbit by an ancient cataclysm, it could hold a chemical snapshot of the planet from millions of years ago. If it is a captured asteroid, it may carry chemistry from the far edges of the solar system.
A five-year itinerary and a race with China
MMX will spend a year traveling to Mars, orbit Phobos for roughly three years, make a close flyby of Deimos, then take another year to bring its samples home. The heat-shielded capsule is scheduled to splash down off the coast of Australia in 2031.
For all that effort, the haul is modest: the lander aims to return less than half an ounce of material. The mission is also racing China’s Tianwen-3 sampling effort, which is expected to reach the Martian surface and return to Earth later in 2031.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/science/2026/10/19/japan-plans-first-mission-collect-rocks-moons-mars/