A Japanese mission to bring samples from a Martian moon back to Earth is set to launch into space from the southwestern prefecture of Kagoshima.<\/p>\n
The Martian Moons eXploration mission, or MMX, will lift off on an H3 rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center at around 4:41 a.m. on Tuesday, Japan time, which is 7:41 p.m. on Monday, UTC.<\/p>\n
The mission is designed to become the first in the world to land on the Martian moon Phobos, collect samples from its surface and deliver them to Earth.<\/p>\n
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, led the project to develop the three-module mission. The total development cost for the mission is 55.3 billion yen, or roughly 350 million dollars.<\/p>\n
The exploration module features four landing legs designed to touch down on Phobos, which has only about one-2,000th of Earth’s gravity.<\/p>\n
It also carries sampling equipment, various observation instruments, and two super hi-vision cameras jointly developed by NHK and JAXA.<\/p>\n
The mission is expected to reach the vicinity of Mars about one year after the launch. It will then spend three years conducting observations.<\/p>\n
The exploration module is scheduled to land on Phobos and collect at least 10 grams of sample material from the moon’s surface layer at a depth of 2 centimeters or more.<\/p>\n
The return module will likely deliver the samples to Earth during the fiscal year that ends in March of 2032.<\/p>\n
JAXA hopes the mission will help it develop techniques necessary to explore the Martian sphere. It also hopes the mission will shed more light on the origin of Phobos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Japanese mission to bring samples from a Martian moon back to Earth is set to launch into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[3995,89749,3471,89751,3,89750,89754,89755,89756,89753,21838,89752,89757,79,193,172,4477],"class_list":["post-886182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-asia","tag-biz","tag-japan","tag-japan-broadcasting-corporation","tag-news","tag-nhk","tag-nhk-world","tag-nhk-world-premium","tag-nhk-world-tv","tag-nhkworld","tag-nuclear","tag-public-broadcaster","tag-radio-japan","tag-science","tag-space","tag-tech","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}