France’s MIRS Imaging Spectrometer, one of 13 instruments on Japan’s MMX space mission to study the moons of Mars, is being prepared for delivery to Japan, where it is expected to arrive at the end of January, AFP reported.

The ten-kilogram instrument, presented to the media on Thursday at the headquarters of the Paris-PSL Médon Observatory, is just waiting to be placed in a box before it takes off.

Once it arrives in Japan, it will be integrated into the MMX (Martian Moon eXploration) probe, which weighs four tons and is scheduled to fly to the Martian system in September 2024 aboard a Japanese rocket.

However, the recent difficulties encountered by the Japanese H3 launcher have raised some uncertainty. “We expect an answer by the end of 2023. If the launch window closes, we will have to wait until 2026,” said Pernelle Bernardi, the engineer responsible for the MIRS system.

The five-year MMX mission will explore two small natural moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, which are 27 and 15 km in diameter, respectively. The main goal is to shed light on the mystery of their formation.

Two hypotheses are discussed

• The first is that these satellites, with their uneven surfaces, are “asteroids captured by the gravitational pull of Mars,” explained Antonella Barucci, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory and MIRS scientific director.
• A second hypothesis is that Phobos and Deimos are the result of a giant impact on the Red Planet, similar to the one that created our Moon from Earth.

The MMX probe will spend three years orbiting Phobos, located about 6,000 kilometers from Mars, while Deimos will only fly by.

MMX will explore different altitudes, some only a few meters above the surface. This will allow choosing the right places to take samples that will be delivered to Earth in 2029.

The MIRS instrument will play a crucial role in this: thanks to its high resolution, the near-infrared spectrometer will be able to determine, for example, which places may contain “ice (water) or organic matter,” explains Antonella. Barucci.

This mission will be a large-scale repetition of another success, thanks to which the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) was able to deliver samples from the Ryugu asteroid to Earth. Then, if the soil samples turn out to have a chemical composition similar to that of Martian soil, then it becomes clear that the impact hypothesis is correct. In addition, it will give researchers the opportunity to study the most primitive Martian material.

Another question that the MMS mission will try to answer is related to the presence of water on Mars. It is already known that the Red Planet still has a tiny atmosphere capable of allowing the existence of water even in a liquid state. Not so for Phobos, an atmosphereless celestial body that has experienced far fewer collisions with celestial bodies compared to Mars.

And soil samples can provide extremely valuable information about the origins of our solar system and how water got to some celestial bodies.