Overview
- The MMX mission, which launched Monday, October 19, 2026, lifted off from Tanegashima on an H3 rocket and is now on a multi-year transfer to Mars with arrival and orbit insertion planned for August 2027.
- A 25 kilogram rover named Idefix built by DLR and CNES rides inside MMX and is scheduled for deployment from the mothercraft around late 2028 or early 2029 to self-right, run on solar power and spend about 100 days scouting Phobos’ surface for safe landing sites.
- MMX aims to collect at least ten grams of Phobos regolith using two sampling approaches—a Japanese drill for shallow subsurface samples and a NASA‑supplied gas‑blow system to lift surface dust—and return the sealed capsule to Earth in 2031 for lab analysis to test whether the moons are captured asteroids or impact debris.
- The mission faces major technical risks because Phobos’ gravity is only a few thousandths of Earth’s, which makes landings prone to bouncing and loss of hardware, and because the H3 launcher has experienced earlier flight anomalies in 2023 and 2025 that observers cite as background reliability concerns.
- MMX is an international campaign led by JAXA with contributions from Europe and the U.S., and it could yield new robotics and miniaturized‑instrument technologies while shaping near‑term plans for Mars samples and future human or robotic operations in the Mars system.