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Something to look forward to: Japan plans to send a spacecraft to Phobos in 2026 to collect material from the small Martian moon and return it to Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's mission is scheduled to launch from Tanegashima Space Center on October 20. If the mission succeeds, the spacecraft will bring back at least 10 grams of material from Phobos, making it the first mission to return samples from a moon orbiting Mars.
The "Martian Moons eXploration" mission, or MMX, is expected to take about a year to reach Mars. It will then spend three years operating around the planet and its moons before beginning a roughly one-year trip back to Earth. The sample return is expected in 2031.
Landing on Phobos will be one of the mission's biggest challenges. The moon is small, with a radius of about 11 kilometers, but its gravity is still much stronger than that of asteroid Ryugu, where JAXA previously landed a spacecraft. At the same time, Phobos has far less gravity than Earth's moon.
