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It’s hard to ideate a much daunting travel than 1 to an alien satellite named aft the Greek deity of fear—especially erstwhile 3 different attempts to marque that travel person failed.
And yet, arsenic Japan’s abstraction agency, JAXA, and its collaborators cogwheel up to send a spacecraft to Mars’ formidably named moon, “all the members are filled with a quiescent consciousness of excitement,” says Kiyoshi Kuramoto, who leads the mission’s slew of planetary scientists.
This mission, called the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), is acceptable to motorboat from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center successful the wee hours of Tuesday successful Japan (Monday day successful the US). After astir a twelvemonth of travel, the spacecraft volition scope Mars and its two moons: Phobos, meaning fearfulness successful Greek, and Deimos, meaning dread. MMX volition observe the brace from afar and cod samples from Phobos successful a bid to reply a looming technological question: How, exactly, did the moons travel to be?
Researchers person been attempting akin gambits for decades. Since the 1980s, Russia has sent 3 probes to Phobos, each of which failed. Still, researchers are anxious to execute this ngo intolerable due to the fact that the root of Phobos and its sibling remains a mystery. Some of their attributes, specified arsenic the signifier of disposable airy they reflect, suggest they are asteroids captured into Mars’ orbit by its gravity. But the moons’ circular orbits successful enactment with the Martian equator bespeak that they could person formed from debris near implicit from a collision betwixt a nascent Mars and a gigantic asteroid, Tom Statler, MMX programme enforcement astatine NASA, said astatine a property briefing.
The caller ngo is designed to assistance settee the statement by surveying Mars and the moons successful item utilizing a suite of technological instruments. With MMX’s MEGANE instrument, for instance, researchers volition find the elemental constitution of Phobos by measuring the neutrino particles and gamma rays it emits. If Phobos ends up having much volatile elements specified arsenic hydrogen oregon potassium, it could thin person to the captured-asteroid hypothesis, portion less volatiles could enactment the interaction idea.
“We cognize thing astir Phobos' elemental composition,” says David Lawrence, who leads the MEGANE squad from Johns Hopkins University. “For me, that’s what’s exciting—making a measurement nobody’s done before.”
These observations are “going to springiness america a hint astatine immoderate of the answers to the truly large questions we person astir Phobos,” says Abigail Fraeman, an MMX squad subordinate astatine NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “But really, the instrumentality samples are going to nail those questions.” After scoping retired Phobos with its onboard instruments and a rover—which volition onshore up of the spacecraft to research the caller terrain—the spacecraft volition onshore connected the satellite to cod astatine slightest 10 grams of worldly utilizing 2 antithetic sampling methods. The extremity is to bring them to Earth by 2031, which would marque them the archetypal ever samples returned from a satellite different than our own.
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