Latest news with #Phobos
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Japan tests its Mars moon sample-return probe ahead of 2026 launch (photo)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Japan is putting its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft through a series of tests ahead of its launch to Mars next year. MMX is a complex mission to collect samples from the moon Phobos and deliver them to Earth to solve the riddle of the origin of the tiny Martian satellite. The spacecraft has been put into a vacuum chamber to test its readiness for deep space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on May 15 via its official mission channel on the social media platform X. "MMX is undergoing a thermal vacuum test, in which the spacecraft is placed in a vacuum chamber where the environment simulates outer space and the operation for each of the onboard instruments is checked," JAXA stated. The image shows the spacecraft's return and exploration modules, while MMX's little IDEFIX rover can be seen in the center, attached to the exploration module. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) IDEFIX rover was developed by the German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR) and the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES). Related stories: — New Japanese spacecraft aims to explore the mysterious moons of Mars — Mars: Everything you need to know about the Red Planet — Mars moons: Facts about Phobos and Deimos A main objective of MMX is to determine whether Phobos and the smaller companion moon Deimos are captured asteroids, or formed from fragments blown into orbit after a giant impact struck Mars. The mission also aims to provide new insights into the history of the Red Planet and planetary formation in general across the wider solar system. MMX is due to be launched on Japan's flagship H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center during the next Mars launch window, in November-December 2026. It was earlier scheduled to launch in the previous launch window in 2024, but this was delayed due to issues with the H3 rocket. If all goes well, MMX will arrive in orbit around Mars in 2027 to begin mapping and analyzing Phobos and Deimos and search for a landing site. MMX will then land on Phobos in 2029 to collect around 0.35 oz (10 grams) of samples. These are expected to be delivered to Earth in 2031.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star.
In the hours just before dawn, NASA's Perseverance rover adjusted its gaze toward the heavens and saw a brilliant point of light. That bright sparkle wasn't a morning star beaming from distant space, but something more mysterious — Mars' shiest moon, Deimos. The rover used one of its navigation cameras at a long-exposure setting to capture the new image. "It's definitely a mood," NASA said of the rare photo in a post on X. SEE ALSO: NASA rover captures an aurora from Mars surface for the first time Because the rover took the image in the dark with an almost one-minute exposure time, the scene appears hazy. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, but scientists know relatively little about them — especially Deimos, the smallest of the two. Both moons are "blacker than coal and look like battered potatoes," according to the European Space Agency, which has studied the pair with its Mars Express spacecraft. Right now researchers aren't sure where the moons came from, and it remains a source of scientific debate. Some believe they could have been asteroids captured in orbit around the Red Planet. Others think they could be chunks of Mars itself, blown out by a giant collision billions of years ago. Nearly all of the images of Deimos, a city-sized moon at roughly 7.5 miles wide, have been taken just like this new one, from the Martian surface by rovers. Because the moon is tidally locked — meaning one full spin matches the amount of time it takes to complete its orbit of Mars — only one of its sides has been seen on the Red Planet. NASA's Perseverance rover was on its way to a new exploration site on the rim of Jezero crater, dubbed Witch Hazel Hill, when it conducted the Deimos photoshoot. Though Perseverance took the image on March 1, NASA just released it to the public. Because the rover took the image in the dark with an almost one-minute exposure time, the scene appears hazy. Many of the white dots in the sky likely aren't distant stars but digital noise. Some others could be cosmic rays, space particles traveling close to the speed of light, according to NASA. Two of the brighter specks are Regulus and Algieba, stars about 78 and 130 light-years away from the solar system respectively, in the constellation Leo. Though little is known about Deimos, another European spacecraft recently captured unprecedented views of the moon's far side. The Hera mission, which will study the asteroid NASA intentionally crashed into three years ago, flew by the Red Planet on March 12, just 11 days after the rover looked up. Hera's flyby wasn't a detour but a necessary maneuver to put the spacecraft on the right trajectory toward its ultimate asteroid destination. Swinging within 625 miles of Deimos, Hera used Martian gravity to adjust its course. Queen cofounder Brian May, who is an astrophysicist when he isn't playing guitar, is among the team that processed the Deimos images. "You feel like you're there, and you see the whole scene in front of you," he said during a news conference in March. "The science that we get from this is colossal, and I think we're all like children."
Washington Post
04-04-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
Mars escapes!
It might seem as if everyone's trying to get some distance from the Kennedy Center these days: Issa Rae. More than a dozen staffers. Mars. Yes, even the Red Planet — the one with a 24.6-hour solar day, the one orbiting the sun and orbited by Phobos and Deimos, that dusty obsession of scientists and sci-fi writers — appeared on Thursday to be fed up with all the drama at the performing arts center. Sort of.
Forbes
01-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
Mars Moons Phobos And Deimos Are Not Captured Asteroids, Says Paper
artist's interpretation of the red planet Mars' mysterious moons of Deimos and Phobos have long puzzled planetary scientists. For decades, it was thought that they were simply asteroids that had been gravitationally captured into Mars' orbit. But in the last decade or so, planetary theorists have warmed to the notion that the most likely scenario for the origin of both moons stems from a large Mars impactor creating a debris ring around the red planet from which both moons may have coalesced. It's also possible that Deimos and Phobos formed from the same disk of material that formed Mars itself, some 4.6 billion years ago. Yet a new paper accepted for publication by The Planetary Science Journal confirms that neither moon was gravitationally captured by Mars. Today, the moons orbit Mars at average distances that range from some 23,463 km for Deimos to only 9376 km for Phobos. Even so, the authors are still puzzled over whether Phobos, in particular, formed early or late. Phobos could have formed billions of years ago at more than twice its current distance from Mars, or it could have formed only 100 million years ago some 20 percent further away from Mars, Matija Cuk, the paper's lead author and a planetary dynamicist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., told me via email. Mars with its two cratered moons Phobos and Deimos. Elements of this image furnished by NASA. We included "lumps" in Mars' gravity field, and also the full gravity of the Sun, says Cuk. Our model also used direct numerical simulations, meaning that we modeled orbits from scratch and do not use time-saving approximations, he says. Even so, the dominant hypothesis now is that they both may have formed from the aftermath of a large impactor that formed a debris disk around Mars, says Cuk. As for their being captured asteroids? Phobos and Deimos have orbits that are close to the Mars' equator, indicating their formation from a circumplanetary disk, the authors write. This means that they formed there and were not gravitationally captured by Mars, says Cuk. Yet Phobos is particularly puzzling. Phobos orbits faster than Mars spins, so it rises in the West and sets in the East, says Cuk. Because of this, Phobos' own gravity causes a slight flexing of Mars' surface which over time causes this Martian moon's orbit to decay and move closer to the red planet's surface, he says. Question is: How long has Phobos been moving inward and from where and when did it form? There are two distinct theories, one that Phobos formed relatively close to Deimos billions of years ago, and the other is that Mars has a repeating cycle of moons breaking into rings which then form new moons, says Cuk. Phobos is now spiraling into Mars and will be gravitationally pulled apart by Mars' gravity and within a few tens of millions of years, Phobos will become a ring of debris, says Cuk. It's a process that can repeat again and again. Each successive inspiralling moon will be torn apart which will result in the creation of a new ring of debris from which another moon will form. This would likely mean that Phobos and its predecessors were each relatively short lived. This would explain why we appear to have caught Phobos in the final stages of its life, says Cuk. Just based on the current orbits of Phobos and Deimos, we cannot tell how old Phobos is and how much its orbit has changed over time, says Cuk. Deimos is almost certainly billions of years old, while Phobos is either more than four plus billion years old, or some 100 to 200 million years old, he says. Either scenario could be true, says Cuk. As for which moon is most scientifically interesting? I prefer Deimos, says Cuk. Unlike Phobos, it has not moved much, and Deimos' orbital tilt may be the only evidence that Mars had other moons in the past, he says. But as Cuk points out, we are likely to know more about Phobos first, since Japan is launching its Martian Moons eXploration mission in 2026. If successful, MMX will return a Phobos sample back to Earth potentially decades before NASA returns samples from Mars' surface.
Observer
29-03-2025
- Science
- Observer
A tiny moon photobombs Mars as europe's Hera mission swoops past
An asteroid-chasing spacecraft just swung past Mars on Wednesday. As it zipped by, it took hundreds of shots of the Red Planet, as well as several snaps of Deimos, one of the two small Martian moons. The operators of the European Space Agency's Hera spacecraft were bewitched by the sci-fi aesthetics of the pictures. 'We were waiting with impatience to get these images,' said Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for Hera, during a Thursday news conference at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. When the first shots of the moon appeared, many of the Hera team members burst into cheers. 'We've never seen Deimos in that way,' Michel said. Navigators managed to fly Hera about 600 miles above Deimos, a craggy moon just 9 miles long. The pass shows the object in remarkable detail — a small island gliding above the crater-scarred Martian desert. During the news conference, Ian Carnelli, the Hera project manager, was misty-eyed. 'I'm going to get emotional,' he said. 'The excitement was such that we didn't get any sleep.' Hera was using Mars in what is known as a gravity assist, both accelerating the spacecraft and adjusting its flight path. But its mission operators also wanted to take advantage of the Martian flyby and use it to test the mechanical eyes that will allow Hera to study the asteroid it is targeting, Dimorphos. In the coming days, the mission's scientists will reveal more photographs from Hera's encounter with Mars, which may include shots of Phobos, the planet's other moon. As with any planetary flyby, there were some nerves about whether Hera would conduct its manoeuvres properly and end up on the right trajectory. 'The spacecraft behaved very well,' said Sylvain Lodiot, the Hera operations manager. 'We're on track to the asteroid system.' Hera is headed to Dimorphos as a follow-up to a 2022 Nasa mission, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. DART deliberately crashed a spacecraft into that asteroid, aiming to change its orbit around a larger asteroid, Didymos. That was a test of whether a dangerous space rock bound for Earth could be deflected in a similar manner. The experiment successfully changed the orbit of Dimorphos. But the asteroid's physical nature, and its full response to DART's collision, remains unclear; some evidence suggests that it acted like a fluid when hit, rather than a solid, causing it to eject a lot of debris and reshape itself. — NYT
