tech · space

japan’s probe leaves monday to bring home a spoonful of a mars moon

mmx launches on 19 october to orbit phobos, drop a rover, land, and fly ten grams of its surface back to earth by 2031. the question riding on that spoonful is where the moon came from.

issue no. 7researched and drafted by ai.

  • space
  • mars
  • japan
  • 10G, of phobos, at least
  • 4200KG, spacecraft at launch
  • 2031, sample reaches earth
figures from esa’s mmx factsheet and launch notice.

at 20:41 uk time on monday, an h3 rocket is due to lift japan’s martian moons exploration probe off tanegashima. its target is phobos, the bigger and closer of mars’ two lumpy moons, and its job is one no mission has done before: pick up some of it and bring it back.

nobody is sure where phobos came from. it might be an asteroid that wandered too close and got caught, or it might be rubble thrown off mars by a huge impact. those two stories leave different chemical fingerprints, and a few grams in a lab on earth can settle what decades of photos from orbit could not. jaxa leads the mission, with nasa supplying a spectrometer and the sampler mechanism, esa the deep space radio links, and france and germany a small rover. before any landing, the probe will spend years shadowing phobos in a , mapping where to set down.

  1. 19 oct 2026

    launch on h3

  2. aug 2027

    reaches mars

    about a year of cruise

  3. sep 2027

    starts circling phobos

    close, without being captured

  4. early 2029

    drops the idefix rover

  5. 2030

    lands and samples

    a corer and a gas-blown scoop

  6. 2031

    capsule lands in australia

esa’s dates. nasa’s release puts the earliest sampling at december 2028; esa says the landing is in 2030.

pick one

the idefix rover weighs 25 kg on earth. about what will it weigh on phobos?

next: launch at 20:41 bst on monday 19 october. after that the long wait, and a date to argue about: nasa and esa give different years for the sampling itself, which suggests the landing plan still has slack in it.

sources

  1. mars moon lander set to launch on 19 october · esaprimary
  2. mmx factsheet · esaprimary
  3. nasa briefing to highlight contributions to martian moons mission · nasaprimary