Overview
- The MMX spacecraft is scheduled to lift off from Tanegashima on Oct. 19–20, 2026, beginning a roughly five‑year mission that aims to return samples from Phobos to Earth in 2031.
- NASA is supplying the MEGANE gamma‑ray/neutron spectrometer, the pneumatic P‑Sampler device, Deep Space Network support, and funding for U.S. scientists while agreeing to curate about 15% of returned material at Johnson Space Center.
- MMX will study both moons from orbit, deploy the small IDEFIX rover on Phobos, and use two samplers—a robotic coring arm and the NASA pneumatic sampler—to collect at least 10 grams of regolith, with sampling operations not to start earlier than December 2028.
- The mission will ride Japan’s new H3 rocket, whose earlier flights included a failed inaugural launch in March 2023 and a later eighth‑flight failure that prompted a formal investigation, making this launch a key test of the booster’s reliability.
- If successful, the returned samples, recovered in Australia and shared among international partners, could resolve the moons’ origin and reshape views of Mars’ early history while informing future human and robotic exploration.