Japan has launched a spacecraft on a first-of-its-kind journey to Mars, where it will try to land on the planet’s moon Phobos and bring a piece of it back to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, which is leading the effort, launched the spacecraft before dawn on Tuesday from the main spaceport on Tanegashima Island, with officials declaring success an hour later, when the spacecraft separated as planned from the rocket’s upper stage. Flight controllers burst into applause, shaking hands and embracing each other.
Five space agencies are backing the five-year mission, which will put a robotic sample collector and a small rover on Phobos, the larger and nearer of Mars’ two tiny moons. The $578 million mission, known as MMX for Martian Moon Exploration, centres on a 5-tonne spacecraft expected to reach Mars by late next summer. It will match Phobos’ tight orbit before releasing Idefix, a French-German rover named after the white terrier in the Asterix comics.
No bigger than a microwave oven, Idefix will drop onto Phobos on its own, bouncing for several minutes before stopping in the moon’s extremely low gravity. NASA has landed nine spacecraft on Mars over the past 50 years, and China touched down in 2021, but no one has ever ventured onto Phobos or its companion, Deimos, and no one has returned samples from Mars, let alone its moons. If successful, dust, soil and rock from Phobos will reach Earth in 2031.
Analysts believe Japan has an edge, having already completed two asteroid sample returns. Phobos is a lumpy, potato-shaped rock about 22 kilometres across. Studying it could explain how Mars’ moons, and possibly moons elsewhere, formed.
The four-wheeled rover is designed to right itself if it lands upside down. All bets are off, though, if it sinks into soft soil or gets wedged between rocks, said the French Space Agency’s Julien Baroukh. Once the rover’s solar panels are deployed, the vehicle can no longer right itself, he added, which is why it will move at a glacial 1 millimetre per second (0.04 inches per second).
Idefix will serve as a “scout for safety,” according to Baroukh, as it prowls around Phobos for 100 days. Japanese flight controllers want to avoid powdery soil and rough terrain when the mothership — a four-legged stationary lander — descends to the surface to gather samples in late 2028 or 2029. The lander will spend just two hours on Phobos, drilling and vacuuming up at least 10 grams (one-third of an ounce) of material before launching back into space.
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