Japan's MMX is on its way to Mars's moons — to bring a piece of Phobos home

Japan's space agency JAXA has launched one of the most ambitious errands in the solar system: the 4,000-kilogram Martian Moons eXploration spacecraft, MMX, riding an H3 rocket toward Phobos, the larger of Mars's two moons. A small rover called IDEFIX, built with French and German partners, will trundle across a surface where gravity is a thousandth of Earth's, and the spacecraft aims to collect at least 10 grams of Phobos material and fly it back to Earth, landing at Woomera in Australia in 2031. No spacecraft has ever returned a sample from the Mars system. What comes home could help explain how the planets formed — and how Earth became a place where life could start.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation