Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

MMX to explore the moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos

The Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is slated for launch in the mid-2020s.

A project of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the MMX spacecraft consists of three modules. The exploration module has landing legs, samplers and some instruments as well as the MMX rover onboard named IDEFIX.

A trilateral cooperation within the framework of the MMX mission involves JAXA, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) and the French space agency (Centre national d’etudes spatiales; CNES).

The German-French rover is to be integrated into the Japanese MMX mission for a landing on the martian moon Phobos in the second half of the 2020s.

After release by the MMX mothership and falling to the surface of Mars’ moon Phobos, the rover is to right itself and power up.
Image credit: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Low gravity

Samples from the martian system, specifically from the martian moon Phobos, will be brought to Earth by the Japanese MMX mothercraft. The IDEFIX rover is to move across and explore the surface of Phobos in conditions of extremely low gravity – roughly two-thousandths of Earth’s gravity.

During the course of the mission, the rover is scheduled to land on Phobos. This will involve setting the rover down from an altitude between roughly 130 feet – 330 feet (40 and 100 meters) above the surface.

After landing, the rover will autonomously upright itself and then become operational, lasting about three months.

MMX rover being readied for delivery from Bremen, Germany to the French space agency, CNES in November 2022. By the summer of 2023, rover instruments and subsystems will be installed.
Image credit: DLR

Towards the end of the mission, ground samples will be collected by the mother spacecraft, making use of the rover surveillance data collected. These samples are to be delivered back to Earth in the MMX return module for more detailed analyses.

According to the DLR, the completion of the rover, including instruments and systems, is on the home stretch towards summer 2023.

Unsolved mystery

The origin of the martian moons Phobos and Deimos remains an unsolved mystery in planetary research.

NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery captures the two moons of the Red Planet.
Image credit: NASA/University of Arizona/MRO

Both moons are irregularly shaped and resemble asteroids.

Accordingly, one theory is Phobos and Deimos were captured by Mars, possibly originating from the asteroid belt.

On the other hand, both moons orbit Mars near the ecliptic plane on which all planets and most of their moons move around the Sun. In addition, both orbits are almost circular.

Those facts seem to counter the “captured asteroids” theory, with the prospect that Phobos and Deimos are leftovers from a huge asteroid impact on the Red Planet.