Both moons have been imaged by several spacecraft before, most notably by NASA’s Viking 2 orbiter in 1977 and by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the 2000s and even by the Curiosity rover from the surface of Mars in 2013. Deimos, at more than 23,000 km in altitude, takes slightly more than 30 hours to orbit. It orbits just 6,000 km above the surface and completes an orbit every seven hours and 39 minutes. Phobos is also the closer of the two to Mars. ![]() Phobos is about 27 km across on its longest side, and Deimos is 15 km across. Both are irregularly shaped, like potatoes. Of Mars’s two moons, Phobos is slightly larger. “Together, we’re going to deepen our knowledge of the solar system.” “We’ve got great partners at JAXA, and they are leading this ambitious mission to bring back the first samples of the Martian moon Phobos,” said Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, in a video message posted to Twitter. scientists to work on MMX and will also supply two instruments for the spacecraft. As part of the partnership, NASA selected 10 U.S. On April 17 NASA and JAXA announced they would be partnering on the mission. The mission is “super complex” but should be highly rewarding, says Patrick Michel of the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France, a European collaborator on MMX and a member of the mission’s science board. It will aim to enter Martian orbit in August 2025 before sidling up to Phobos in 2026 to scoop samples and return them to Earth by 2029. The solar-powered spacecraft, expected to launch in September 2024, weighs in at more than three metric tons and is roughly the size of an SUV. ![]() The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is hoping to avoid the same fate with its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. “It never got out of Earth orbit,” says John Logsdon, a space historian and professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. ![]() An attempt by Russia to do so ended in failure in 2012, when its Phobos-Grunt spacecraft crashed into the Pacific Ocean shortly after launch. To find out for sure, scientists want to return samples of Phobos to Earth. “We don’t believe that is an asteroid,” says Hessa Al Matroushi, science lead of the mission at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai. Those results suggest the Deimos’s composition more closely matches Mars than that of a class of asteroids that was previously flagged as the likely raw material for Deimos and Phobos alike: D-type asteroids in the outer asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft returned some of the best data and images of Deimos yet from as low as 100 kilometers above the moon’s surface. announced that its orbiter, Hope, had studied the smaller of Mars’s two moons, Deimos. “There’s room to be surprised, but I think we’re going to figure it out,” says Jemma Davidson of Arizona State University. The mission will build on exciting new results from a United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) orbiter at Mars that suggest a planetary origin for the two moons. A Japanese spacecraft launching next year will attempt to bring samples back from Phobos. It remains unclear which of these two formation routes holds true for Mars’s moons, Phobos and Deimos-but we may soon have an answer. ![]() Some moons in the solar system, such as several of Jupiter’s smaller satellites, appear to be captured asteroids. We know that Earth’s moon was likely formed from a giant impact on our planet about 4.5 billion years ago. Where did the moons of Mars come from? That’s a question scientists still can’t answer.
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