Japan’s planned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft mission involves drilling and sampling Phobos, then rocketing the coveted collectibles back to Earth.
Yet another MMX mission component is a German-French rover being jointly developed by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
During that time, the rover will approach scientific targets of interest, helping to discern which specimens of Phobos will be collected by the mother spacecraft for hauling to Earth in its return module.
Terik Daly is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland and is on the MMX science working team.
Selected early this year as a NASA-funded participating scientist, he will search for surface changes on Phobos and Deimos by comparing MMX photo data with past imagery of the two moons.
“To verify that the Pneumatic Sampler is ready for the mission, we did a lot of tests in a vacuum chamber with Phobos regolith simulant provided by Exolith lab at the University of Central Florida,” Zacny said.
The original article contains 1,182 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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Japan’s planned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft mission involves drilling and sampling Phobos, then rocketing the coveted collectibles back to Earth.
Yet another MMX mission component is a German-French rover being jointly developed by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
During that time, the rover will approach scientific targets of interest, helping to discern which specimens of Phobos will be collected by the mother spacecraft for hauling to Earth in its return module.
Terik Daly is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland and is on the MMX science working team.
Selected early this year as a NASA-funded participating scientist, he will search for surface changes on Phobos and Deimos by comparing MMX photo data with past imagery of the two moons.
“To verify that the Pneumatic Sampler is ready for the mission, we did a lot of tests in a vacuum chamber with Phobos regolith simulant provided by Exolith lab at the University of Central Florida,” Zacny said.
The original article contains 1,182 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!