Mission seeks to do what no other space power has managed: Bring back samples from the Martian system
By Jason Douglas and Junko Fukutome
TANEGASHIMA SPACE CENTER, Japan -- As a young science student in Japan, Hideaki Miyamoto spent a lot of his time working on Nozomi, a doomed mission to send a probe to Mars.
Three decades after that failure, Japan is embarking on an even more ambitious trip to the red planet. It hopes to succeed where past attempts have failed and not only land on Mars's mysterious moon, Phobos, but also bring back samples of its surface to earth.
The Mars Moons Exploration mission, or MMX, blasted off from Japan's Tanegashima island on Tuesday morning local time, the start of a five-year round-trip that, all being well, will make landfall in Australia carrying fragments of Phobos in 2031.
"When we were working on Nozomi, exploring Mars still felt like a distant dream. This time, after all the preparation, it feels as though we are finally ready," said Miyamoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo who is leading the mission's geological investigations.
The groundbreaking mission's goal is to uncover new insights about Mars, its moons and the origins of our solar system, according to Japan's space agency, JAXA, and scientists from around the world involved in the mission.
"There's a lot of adrenaline, a lot of excitement and a lot of wow," said Tom Statler, a National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientist and MMX program executive at the U.S. space agency, which along with its European counterparts is collaborating with JAXA on the Martian moonshot.
JAXA has spent around $350 million to get this far. Along with expertise and key pieces of hardware, the other space agencies have contributed funding, with NASA pitching in some $87 million.
Phobos is a dark, misshapen lump about 27 kilometers (roughly 17 miles) in diameter that orbits the red planet in a puzzlingly close-to-perfect circle.
The MMX mission is designed to shed light on where the moon came from, as well as broader insights into how planets and moons form.
There are two competing theories: One is that Phobos is an asteroid that strayed into Mars's gravitational field and got stuck there. The second is that a long-ago giant impact blasted debris from Mars into space, which eventually coalesced into the moon that circles the planet today.
Scientists still don't know what they'll find on the surface. It could be solid rock. Or it could be a jumble of boulders and gravel barely held together by the moon's feeble gravity, a cosmic ball-pit that makes exploration tricky.
Russia tried sending a craft to the Martian moon in 2011 with a similar goal of bringing back fragments of Phobos, but it failed. Though Phobos and its sister moon, Deimos, have been photographed by spacecraft since the 1970s, no probe has yet been there, nor has any space agency retrieved samples from Mars or its moons.
"It is a world-class, top of the line mission," said Jonathan McDowell, an honorary professor of physics at Durham University and a historian of spaceflight. "It is a really ambitious mission for Japan."
The Japanese spacecraft blasted off atop a powerful H-3 rocket at 4.41 a.m. local time Tuesday. Japan hopes the H-3 -- manufactured by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries -- can grab a slice of the lucrative market for commercial space launches from competitors including SpaceX.
MMX is expected to take about a year to reach Mars and its moons. It will spend months studying Phobos from afar using the many instruments crammed inside.
"It is kind of a Swiss Army knife, in terms of the science," said Elliot Sefton-Nash, a planetary scientist at the European Space Agency, which is providing scientists, equipment and satellite support to the mission.
Among the instruments on board are a spectrometer contributed by NASA to determine the mineral composition of the moon, lasers to measure distance and map the surface, dust and radiation monitors, and a host of cameras.
Choosing a landing site to collect the samples will take months of careful analysis and progressively closer orbits, said Hiroshi Kikuchi, an assistant professor in the department of physics at Japan's Gakushuin University and a former student of Miyamoto. Kikuchi has the job of calculating the surface gravity measurements needed for the landing, a task complicated by Phobos's bumpy and irregular shape.
When the spacecraft gets to around 40 meters from Phobos's surface, likely sometime in late 2028 or early 2029, a rover built by the French and German space agencies will pop out and spend 100 days scouting the terrain before the craft makes its landing. The compact rover is named Idéfix, a nod to the small but ferocious dog in the Asterix comics.
Markus Grebenstein, head of the department of mechatronic systems at the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, said the most nail-biting moment of the five-year mission for him will be when Idéfix falls to the surface. It could take hours for the team on Earth to know whether it survived, he said, given the gaps in communication over such huge distances.
The unprecedented landing will be another hair-raising moment, scientists involved in the mission say. Still, Japan has experience in visiting small celestial objects and bringing samples back home. Its pioneering Hayabusa missions twice returned material from asteroids.