Japan is preparing to launch the first return trip to Mars’ orbit, aiming to retrieve physical samples from the moon Phobos and search for further possible signs of life. An H3 rocket is set to blast off from Tanegashima Space Center on Tuesday carrying a spacecraft that will make a five-year voyage that promises to reveal vital data on the red planet’s secrets and the feasibility of human travel there. The so-called MMX expedition, a collaboration with US and European space agencies, has risen in importance after Nasa cancelled its own Mars sample return programme due to cost overruns and science budget cuts. The MMX module will drop a wheeled exploration rover named Idefix, after the dog who features in the Astérix comic books and is known to English-language readers as Dogmatix.
We’ve been to Mars a lot of times, but we’ve never come back, so it’s a huge milestone for space exploration,” said Sanjeev Gupta, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London. The origin of Phobos and its fellow moon Deimos is “one of the big unsolved questions in planetary science” with potential implications for the possibility of life on Mars and elsewhere, he added.
If Phobos is an asteroid, it’s likely to belong to the fleet of asteroids thought to have brought significant amounts of the water and volatile chemicals needed for life from the outer to the inner solar system early in its history,” Gupta said. The meteor-gouged moons are named for the twin sons of the gods Aphrodite and Ares, the Greek counterpart of Roman war deity Mars. Scientists hope to search material from Phobos, the larger of the duo, to settle the long-running mystery of how it and Deimos came to be. While it is possible the pair are asteroids captured long ago in Mars’ orbit, they could alternatively be debris from a giant collision between the red planet and another celestial body. If the moons are the product of such a cosmic crash, they may contain Martian matter that includes clues on whether the planet was able to support life.
Material returned from Phobos could serve as a time capsule of ancient Mars,” said Yasuhiro Kawakatsu, the MMX expedition’s project manager. “Or [it could be] a record of the building blocks delivered to the young terrestrial planets that may have contributed to the emergence of habitability.”
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing