Around a dozen rovers or landing vehicles have already successfully touched down on Mars. From the USA, China or the former Soviet Union. But soil material from Mars or its two moons has never been transported to Earth. That should change now.
Now the MMX project (Martian Moons eXploration) has been started under the leadership of Japan. The largest Japanese mission to date into the solar system has a technically and scientifically spectacular script in which Germany is also involved.
For a long time it looked as if the Europeans would bring soil samples from Mars to Earth through their space agency ESA together with the US space agency NASA. Since autumn 2021, the US rover Perseverance has been collecting material on the red planet. But the costs for the project rose to eleven billion dollars and the expected sample arrival on Earth was delayed until 2040 at the earliest. Against this background, the US Congress, under the direction of US President Donald Trump, put the European-American joint project on hold in January 2026.
The Chinese now have the most realistic mission for real Mars surface samples. Their Tianwen-3 mission is scheduled to launch in 2028 and will bring at least 500 grams of soil samples to Earth. Landing is scheduled for 2031.
The target of the Japanese Mars mission is not the red planet itself, but its two small moons. On the one hand, the larger moon Phobos, on which the MMX probe is expected to briefly land twice in 2029 and before that will release a small rover called Idefix at the turn of the year 2028/29. On the other hand, the moon Deimos, which is to be explored in flybys. The scientists' goal is to decipher the formation of Mars' moons and the history of the Mars system. They also want to further develop technologies for future, possibly manned, Mars explorations.
Germany is helping to build Idefix
Through the DLR (German Aerospace Center), Germany is involved, especially with its Institute for Robotics, in the Idefix rover, which is intended to travel on the Mars moon Phobos. This time the name does not refer to Obelix's little dog in the comic series “Asterix”, but rather a cart with four individually driven wheels the size of a large drinks crate. Idefix weighs around 25 kilos on Earth. Due to the low gravity on the moon Phobos, the weight on site is reduced to just twelve to 15 grams, about the weight of a large grape. The rover was created in German-French collaboration between DLR and France's space agency CNES.
DLR CEO Anke Kaysser-Pyzalla was visibly proud of Germany's contribution to the mission at the DLR Oberpfaffenhofen site when the Japanese rocket was launched. “It is an example that we are at the forefront of technology development,” she said on the sidelines of the event.
2030 will be drilled
The rover's landing maneuver is unique: if everything goes according to plan, it will fall from the probe onto the surface of Phobos from a height of 100 to 40 meters. It could bounce there several times, can right itself and is expected to operate for about 100 days and could possibly travel 100 meters. It is intended to send images and data to support the landing of the exploration module. Around 2030, this main module will then drill into the Phobos surface to a depth of two centimeters and also collect swirled surface particles using a pneumatic system in which high-pressure nitrogen gas is ejected. The surface material will then fly back to Earth in a return capsule with a diameter of around 60 centimeters.
The Japanese space agency JAXA and DLR can build on their experience with return capsules to Earth and landing vehicles for the MMX mission. In December 2020, a return capsule landed in Australia with a good five grams of material from the asteroid Ryugu from the Japanese mission Hayabusa2. The landing vehicle used was developed and built by DLR, also in close cooperation with the French space agency CNES and JAXA.
The MMX mission that has now started not only involves the Japanese, but also NASA, ESA, DLR and France's CNES. The costs of the project amount to only a fraction of the Europeans' canceled Mars mission with NASA. The Idefix rover costs 50 million euros, said the DLR boss. The Japanese are not revealing how much the entire MMX mission will cost.
