Bringing Back Sand from Phobos — The Martian Mysteries JAXA's MMX is Built to Solve
April 16, 2026Launching in autumn 2026, JAXA's MMX will be humanity's first mission to retrieve samples from a Martian moon. Why target a moon instead of Mars itself, and what can 10 grams of sand actually tell us? We dig into the century-old debate between the capture hypothesis and the giant-impact hypothesis.