Though the two moons of Mars were discovered in 1877, it took 92 years until we could get their close-up photographs! This again, thanks to Mariner 7, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) spacecraft launched in 1969 to study Mars. Even in the following years, we did not have any Deimos or Phobos explorations – we had to be satisfied with their photographs taken during Mars missions such as those by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). But this is not to say that Martian moon exploration programmes were not planned.
Even as early as 1988, humans had dreamt of sending probes to Phobos, the larger of the two moons of Mars. The Soviet Union’s (present-day Russia) Phobos 1 and Phobos 2 were designed to do just that! But while Phobos 1 failed before it could reach its destination, contact with Phobos 2 was lost just before it could reach within 50 metres of the moon to release its landers. In 2011, the Russian Space Agency made plans to collect samples from Phobos during the Fobos-Grunt (meaning ‘Phobos-Ground’ in Russian) mission. Unfortunately that too failed during the launch stage.
But hope still remains in the form of Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Martian Moons Exploration (MMX for short)! This mission, developed along with ESA, the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), the (French) National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), and NASA, will be launched in 2024. It will hopefully collect many samples from Phobos, and also study Deimos and Mars remotely.
Picture Credit : Google
