Japan to Launch World's First Mission to Bring Mars Moon Dust Back to Earth

Japan is set to launch one of the most ambitious space missions in history on Tuesday — a spacecraft that will travel to Mars' largest moon, Phobos, scoop up its soil, and bring it back to Earth. The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) probe will lift off from Tanegashima Space Center aboard Japan's H3 rocket, beginning a five-year round trip.

The mission, led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with NASA, the European Space Agency and French and German partners, aims to collect at least 10 grams of material from Phobos and return it to Earth in 2031, landing in the Australian outback. A small French-German rover named Idefix will also scout the moon's surface. Scientists hope the samples will finally settle a decades-old mystery: whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or debris blasted off Mars by an ancient impact. Landing on Phobos is no small feat — its gravity is roughly 1/2,000th of Earth's, so the spacecraft will descend gently on shock-absorbing legs, grab its sample in about two and a half hours, and lift off again. If it succeeds, it will be humanity's first-ever sample return from the Martian system.

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