​The US-European Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission will bring the first Martian soil samples back to Earth, most likely in 2033, after one of the most challenging interplanetary missions in history, and China’s upcoming Tianwen-3 Mars mission wants to do the same job soon after MSR. But Japan has found a shortcut and wants to bring soil samples from around Mars in just 6 years, that is, in 2029!

Perhaps Japan will be able to do this, since the Japanese probe Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) will not be sent to Mars itself, but somewhere near it, that is, to one of the two natural moons of Mars – Phobos. No probe has yet managed to land on the surface of Phobos: the last attempt was the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, which launched on November 8, 2011, but a technical problem with the launch vehicle resulted in the probe only remaining in low Earth orbit, and several weeks later it was out of control fell into the Pacific Ocean on January 15, 2012.

Planning for the Martian Moons eXploration mission began in 2015, and the probe is expected to launch in September 2024. That is if Japan’s new H3 rocket doesn’t suffer major delays: the rocket’s first launch failed miserably (and cost the satellite more than $250 million), and flights of the new rocket are now suspended until an investigation into the cause of the malfunction is completed.

After launch, the Martian Moons eXploration probe will head for Mars, first orbiting the planet before moving into orbit around Phobos. I say some sort of orbit because Phobos is not very large and the probe will have to perform a series of corrective maneuvers to keep it around the Martian moon. After that, the probe will touch down on Phobos once or twice, collecting at least 10 grams of soil from a depth of about 2 cm, which it will return to Earth in 2029.

But not before another Martian moon, Deimos, passes by (though it’s smaller than Phobos, so the probe won’t try to land on it either). In addition, the European rover, built by the French and German space agencies, will spend several weeks on the surface of Phobos after being delivered there by the Japanese MMX probe. Since the probe does not need to descend to and from the surface of Mars, fuel consumption will be reduced and therefore the mission complexity, although high, remains lower than that of the Mars Sample Return mission.

The probe will be equipped with no less than 7 scientific instruments, which will hopefully provide the necessary data to determine whether these two Martian moons are bodies captured by Mars in the planet’s geological past, or the result of a collision between Mars and other alien bodies (the truth is, that we still do not know exactly what the nature of the Martian satellites is).

Two optical cameras and a LIDAR device for studying the surface of satellites, infrared and other gamma-neutron spectrometers for geological studies, a mass spectrometer for studying ions around the planet Mars. Along with these scientific instruments, the probe will also be equipped with high-resolution (8K) cameras, so we expect to see the planet Mars and its natural moons as we have never seen them before.

So, if it turns out that Phobos is actually a body separated from the planet Mars, Japanese laboratories could become the first in the world to obtain samples of Martian soil 5 years before the Mars Sample Return mission.

The Japanese space agency JAXA has experience with this type of mission: in 2005, the Hayabusa probe landed on the asteroid Itokawa, from where it took soil samples, which it returned to Earth (despite the malfunction of the probe), and in 2018, the Hayabusa2 mission landed on the asteroid Ryugu , where it also took samples and left several rovers (including MASCOT, the European rover).

Phobos is about 25 km in diameter (the Moon, for example, is almost 3,500 km) and is the closest moon to the surface of Mars (9,300 km), while Deimos is 12 km in diameter and orbits Mars at an altitude of over 23,000 km.

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