In the early hours of the morning of 20 October, the Martian Moons Exploration spacecraft lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan, destined for Mars’ distant and enigmatic moon, Phobos.
Its goal is to extract a 10g sample of dust from the surface of Phobos and return it to Earth in 2031. If successful, this will be the first time a sample from Mars or its moons is analysed in laboratories here on Earth. As Markus Grebenstein, an engineer at the German Aerospace Center says, this is truly a “once-in-a-lifetime” mission. The spacecraft is set to arrive at Phobos in August 2027. Since Phobos is a very small moon, just 22.5km in diameter, this will be no easy feat, partly due to the fact that the tiny moon is next to a planet that has much higher gravity. This makes it much harder to get a rover onto the surface.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) hopes to sync the spacecraft with Phobos’ orbit around Mars before ejecting a small French-German rover onto the surface of the moon. Once landed, the rover will spend 100 days surveying Phobos’ surface, seeking suitable sampling and landing sites for the main craft. Remarkably, after landing on the moon, the main craft will need just 2 hours to collect material before launching back into space. The spacecraft will leave Mars’ orbit in 2030, after observing the planet’s other moon, Deimos, during multiple flybys.
The primary goal of this mission is to investigate the origin of Mars’ moons. There are currently two main theories; the first is that the moons are early-Martian debris, formed by an impact event billions of years ago. The second is that the moons are two wandering asteroids from the outer solar system, which were captured by Mars’ gravity. The chemical composition of the sample will hopefully help scientists validate one of the two hypotheses. Moreover, Prof Sara Russell from the Natural History Museum told the BBC that Phobos is so close to the planet’s surface that martian grains may have actually become “implanted into Phobos itself” due to asteroid impacts. This is intensely exciting since it means the mission will give us direct information about the composition and history of Mars. JAXA declares the mission will help reveal “how a habitable environment for life might have arisen on the terrestrial planets” such as Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
Photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash
