"Once-in-a-lifetime chance": Japan launches historic mission to a moon of Mars

Japan has successfully launched a spacecraft on an unprecedented mission to retrieve samples from one of Mars’s moons, which scientists hope will shed light on the origins of the Solar System and life on Earth. UNN reports this, citing The Guardian.

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According to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) spacecraft, launched  aboard Japan’s flagship H3 carrier rocket, lifted off before dawn on October 20 from Tanegashima Island in the country’s far southwest.

The spacecraft is expected to reach Mars orbit in August next year and collect at least 10 grams of soil and rock from the surface of Phobos, one of the two small, potato-shaped moons orbiting the planet. According to JAXA, its return is scheduled for 2031.

The moon, which has a diameter of 22.5 km, orbits Mars three times a day at an altitude of about 6,000 km above its surface.

The flagship H3 rocket carrying the unmanned probe lifted off into the dark sky from the Tanegashima Space Center at 4:41 a.m., witnessed by thousands of people who woke up early to watch the live broadcast.

An hour later, JAXA scientists declared the launch successful when the spacecraft separated from the rocket’s upper stage,  prompting celebrations at the flight control center.

Over the past half-century, NASA has landed nine spacecraft on Mars, while China landed on the Martian surface in 2021, but this is the first attempt to land on Phobos or the planet’s smaller moon, Deimos.

"There’s a lot of adrenaline, a lot of excitement and a lot of wow," said NASA astrophysicist Tom Statler, who is involved in the Japan-led sample-collection project.

Five space agencies are cooperating on the five-year mission, which will attempt to land a scouting robot and a rover on Phobos, the larger and closer of the two moons.

The $578 million mission consists of a five-ton spacecraft that will synchronize with Phobos in a close orbit around Mars when it arrives next summer. It will then catapult a small Franco-German rover, named Idefix after the white terrier from the Asterix comic books.

If all goes according to plan, the four-wheeled rover will bounce (due to Phobos’s gravity, which is 1/1,000 that of Earth) for several minutes across the surface before coming to a stop. It will spend 100 days exploring the surface of the celestial body to find safe landing and sampling sites before the arrival of the main spacecraft, a four-legged stationary lander that will collect the samples.

The lander will spend just two hours drilling into Phobos and collecting material before setting off back into space. Officials said they would observe Deimos during several flybys before leaving Mars orbit in November 2030.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We are part of the first sample-return mission from the Martian system," said Markus Grebenstein, head of the German Space Agency’s rover project.

Scientists hope the samples will help them determine how Phobos and Deimos formed and may even provide clues about the origins of life. NASA said the MMX findings will also help shape future missions to Mars, including crewed expeditions.

According to one theory—the "giant impact" hypothesis—the two moons formed after a celestial body collided with Mars. A second explanation, known as the "capture" hypothesis, suggests that the moons are asteroids drawn in by Mars’s gravity.

Determining the correct theory will help reveal "how a habitable environment could have arisen on the terrestrial planets," JAXA said, referring to the four planets closest to the Sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

The United States and China are competing to be the first to return rock samples from the surface of Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which has been exploring Mars since 2021, has already collected samples, but its return to Earth was halted by the Trump administration following a vote in Congress in January this year.

The launch of China’s "Tianwen-3" spacecraft is scheduled for around 2028, and it could return Martian samples as early as 2031, possibly before the return of the Japanese mission, the publication notes.

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