Lander (spacecraft) 2012. Planned for 2018, NASA's Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher lander mission was cancelled due to budget cuts. Exploration of Mars including the use of landers continues to this day. Amongst them, Russia has planned a Mars sample return mission Mars-Grunt for near 2026, and China for near 2030. While several flybys conducted by Mars orbiting probes have provided images and other data about the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, only few of them intended to land on the surface of these satellites. Two probes under the Soviet Phobos program were successfully launched in 1988, but in 1989 the intended landings on
Phobos (moon) is currently ongoing. As of 2017, MMX is scheduled to be launched in 2024, and will return to Earth five years later. Russia plans to repeat Fobos-Grunt mission in the late 2020s, and the European Space Agency is assessing a sample-return mission for 2024 called Phootprint. Phobos has been proposed as an early target for a Human mission to Mars. The teleoperation of robotic scouts on Mars by humans on Phobos could be conducted without significant time delay, and planetary protection concerns in early Mars exploration might be addressed by such an approach. Phobos has also been proposed as an