The mysterious origins of Mars\u2019s moons <\/p>\n
Many mysteries about the Red Planet remain unsolved, but the question of how Mars got its moons is among the most hotly debated. Scientists are currently divided over whether Phobos and Deimos are ancient asteroids that were ensnared by Mars\u2019s gravity billions of years ago, or the coagulated remains of a massive impact on Mars that blasted material into orbit.<\/p>\n
The MMX mission could not only help scientists figure out what these moons are and where they came from, but also provide insight into Mars itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,\u201d Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX\u2019s sample extractors, recently told<\/a> Science.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s going to be Phobos and Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s because the moons\u2014regardless of their origins\u2014are likely dusted in material blasted off the Red Planet. Kiyoshi Kuramoto, a planetary scientist at Hokkaido University and leader of the mission\u2019s international team of scientists, told Science that 1% of the material MMX retrieves from Phobos could come from Mars.<\/p>\n That would make MMX the first mission to return Red Planet material to Earth. NASA\u2019s Mars Sample Return mission was effectively canceled in January, leaving dozens of rock cores collected by the Perseverance rover in limbo<\/a>.\u00a0The MMX sample will contain a treasure trove of information about the Martian system, offering new hope for planetary scientists working to understand its history and past habitability.<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, piecing together the genesis of Phobos and Deimos \u201cwill help illuminate that early era when Earth and the other inner planets may have been acquiring much of their water and organic compounds,\u201d Tom Statler, MMX program executive and program scientist at NASA, said<\/a> in a statement.<\/p>\n The journey begins <\/p>\n If today\u2019s launch goes according to plan, the MMX spacecraft will embark on a 10-month journey to Mars. Its first stop will be Phobos, where it will spend about three years studying the little moon. MMX will attempt at least one landing to extract a sample from Phobos, but ideally it will land twice to extract samples from different locations. This will help scientists better analyze the moon\u2019s composition.<\/p>\n After gathering at least 10 grams of material, MMX will depart Phobos and move on to observe Deimos, though it will not attempt a landing on this smaller moon. The spacecraft will then begin the long flight back to Earth. JAXA is currently targeting a 2031 return, but that remains to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The mysterious origins of Mars\u2019s moons Many mysteries about the Red Planet remain unsolved, but the question of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,27482,2704,24020,13956,82,247],"class_list":["post-659492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jaxa","tag-mars","tag-moons","tag-planetary-science","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=659492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}