Phobos (moon) was proposed to place an orbiter in Mars orbit by 2021 to study Phobos and Deimos through a series of close flybys. The mission is called Phobos And Deimos & Mars Environment (PADME). Two other Phobos missions that were proposed for the Discovery 13 selection included a mission called "Merlin", which would flyby Deimos but actually orbit and land on Phobos, and another one is "Pandora" which would orbit both Deimos and Phobos. The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) unveiled in 9 June 2015 the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX), a sample return mission targeting Phobos. MMX will land and collect
Exploration of Mars space probe to orbit another planet when it entered into orbit around Mars. The amount of data returned by probes increased dramatically as technology improved. The first to contact the surface were two Soviet probes: Mars 2 lander on November 27 and Mars 3 lander on December 2, 1971Mars 2 failed during descent and Mars 3 about twenty seconds after the first Martian soft landing. Mars 6 failed during descent but did return some corrupted atmospheric data in 1974. The Soviet probes Phobos 1 and 2 were sent to Mars in 1988 to study Mars and its two moons, with