Japan Launches Spacecraft to Mysterious Moons of Mars in a Bold Mission to Bring Home Soil Samples
The five-year mission will collect at least 10 grams of Phobos soil and could help explain how Mars’s moons formed, JAXA said.
- On Tuesday, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launched its flagship H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center carrying the Martian Moons Exploration probe, starting a five-year mission to retrieve samples from Phobos.
- The $US578 million, 5-ton spacecraft aims to retrieve material that could reveal the solar system's origins, an unprecedented challenge as no agency has ever successfully landed on or fetched samples from the Martian moons.
- JAXA will deploy a French-German rover named Idefix to the 22-kilometer-wide Phobos. The rover serves as a "scout for safety," French Space Agency official Julien Baroukh said, prowling the surface for 100 days.
- Flight controllers plan to land the four-legged mothership on Phobos in late 2028 or 2029 to drill and vacuum up at least 10 grams of material before launching back to Earth.
- After studying the twin moon Deimos, the probe will return to the Australian desert in 2031. NASA astrophysicist Tom Statler said, "There's a lot of adrenaline," underscoring the mission's complexity and scientific stakes.
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Japan sends rocket on world first Mars moon mission
Japan launched an uncrewed spacecraft toward the Martian moon Phobos on Tuesday on a mission intended to become the first to collect samples from the small rocky body and return them to Earth for analysis. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft lifted off aboard an H3 rocket before dawn from the Tanegashima Space Centre in southwestern Japan. The spacecraft is expected to reach Mars in August 2027 and retur…
Japan, which pioneered asteroid sample retrieval technology in space exploration, has now set out to retrieve satellite samples. The Japan Aerospace Research and Development Agency (JAXA) launched the MMX spacecraft—which will collect rocks and soil from Mars' moon Phobos and bring them back to Earth in five years—at 4:31 a.m. on the 20th from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture.
Japan successfully launches probe in historic Mars moon mission
The flagship H3 rocket carrying the unmanned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) probe blasted off into a pitch black sky from the Tanegashima Space Center at 4:41 a.m. (1941 GMT Monday), according to a live stream broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
On Monday, Moscow time, the Japanese interplanetary spacecraft MMX launched a mission to Mars Fobos, during which it would collect samples of its soil and deliver them to Earth, live broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Agency (JAXA).
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