Tokyo: Japan launched an uncrewed spacecraft towards Mars on Tuesday on an unprecedented mission to explore the planet’s mysterious moons and bring back samples for analysis. The mission aims to become the first to collect material from Phobos, the larger and closer of Mars’s two moons, and return it to Earth.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which is leading the effort, launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft aboard an H3 rocket before dawn from the Tanegashima Space Center on Tanegashima Island in southwestern Japan.
Five of the world’s space agencies have joined forces for the five-year mission, which will attempt to deploy a robotic lander and a rover on Phobos. If successful, the spacecraft will return samples of dust, soil, and rocks to Earth in 2031.
While NASA has successfully landed nine spacecraft on Mars over the past 50 years and China achieved a landing in 2021, no space agency has ever ventured onto Phobos or its smaller companion, Deimos. No mission has yet returned samples from Mars or its moons.
The spacecraft is expected to reach Mars in August 2027. The USD 578 million mission features a five-tonne spacecraft that will synchronise with Phobos’s tight orbit around the Red Planet before deploying the French-German rover Idefix, named after the white terrier in the Asterix comics.
“There's a lot of adrenaline and a lot of excitement and a lot of wow,” said NASA astrophysicist Tom Statler, who is involved with the project.
Japan has prior experience in sample-return missions, having already brought back material from two asteroids.
Phobos is an irregular, potato-shaped rocky body. While it is roughly 22 kilometres across, its dimensions are also described as approximately 27 km by 22 km by 18 km (17 miles by 14 miles by 11 miles). It orbits about 6,000 km (3,700 miles) above the Martian surface and circles the planet three times a day.
Studying samples from Phobos could help scientists understand how Mars’s moons, and possibly moons elsewhere in the solar system, formed.
No larger than a microwave oven, Idefix will descend onto Phobos independently, bouncing for several minutes before coming to rest in the moon’s extremely low gravity.
The four-wheeled rover is designed to right itself if it lands upside down. However, it could become stuck if it sinks into soft soil or gets wedged between rocks, said Julien Baroukh of the French Space Agency. Once its solar panels are deployed, the rover will no longer be able to right itself, he added. It will therefore move at a speed of just 1 millimetre per second.
Idefix will act as a “scout for safety”, according to Baroukh, surveying Phobos for 100 days. Japanese flight controllers will use the rover’s observations to identify suitable landing sites and avoid powdery soil and rough terrain before the main spacecraft’s four-legged stationary lander descends to collect samples in late 2028 or 2029.
The lander will spend just two hours on Phobos, drilling into the surface and vacuuming up at least 10 grams of material, equivalent to roughly one-third of an ounce, before launching back into space.
The spacecraft will also study Deimos through a series of flybys. It is scheduled to leave the Martian neighbourhood in 2030 and return to Earth in 2031, delivering the samples to the Australian desert.
The mission faces considerable risks, with previous attempts to explore Phobos ending in failure. The moons’ names reflect their ominous associations: Phobos means “fear” in Greek, while Deimos means “dread”. In Greek mythology, they are the twin sons of Ares, the god of war, known as Mars in Roman mythology.
Russia has failed in all three of its attempts to reach Phobos, as well as in several other Mars missions. Japan’s only previous Mars mission also failed to place a spacecraft into orbit around the planet. NASA, too, has experienced mission failures while investigating whether life ever existed on Mars.
Scientists hope that studying Phobos and Deimos will help determine whether the moons formed following an ancient collision between Mars and a large space rock. Another possibility is that they are asteroids captured by Mars’s gravitational pull.
Researchers also anticipate finding traces of Mars on Phobos. This could make the samples particularly valuable, offering insights into the formation of planets and moons and potentially helping scientists investigate the conditions associated with the emergence of life.
The findings are expected to inform future Mars missions, including potential missions involving astronauts, said Lindsay Hays, NASA’s acting planetary science director.
“It is a once-in-a-lifetime chance. We are part of the first sample return mission from the Martian system,” said Markus Grebenstein, the German Space Agency’s rover chief.
Japan is not the only country seeking to retrieve samples from the Martian system. China plans to launch a Mars sample-return mission in 2028, while NASA is still debating how to retrieve more than 30 sample tubes collected by its Perseverance Mars rover, which holds the record for off-Earth driving.
Japan and China are targeting 2031 for the return of samples from the Martian system, potentially putting their missions on a similar timeline.
Japan is investing USD 350 million in the MMX mission. NASA is contributing USD 87 million, the French Space Agency about USD 68 million, the German Space Agency about USD 56 million and the European Space Agency about USD 17 million.
The launch also marked the first interplanetary mission for Japan’s H3 rocket. The country’s flagship launcher suffered a high-profile failure on its inaugural flight in 2023 when its second-stage engine failed to ignite. It has since completed a series of mostly successful launches.
(With agency input from Reuters and AP via PTI)