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
Phobos 2 to approach within of Phobos' surface and release two landers, one a mobile , the other a stationary platform, contact with "Phobos 2" was lost. The mission ended when the spacecraft signal failed to be successfully reacquired on 27 March 1989. The cause of the failure was determined to be a malfunction of the on-board computer. The "Phobos 2" infrared spectrometer (ISM) obtained 45000 spectra in the near infrared (from ) in the equatorial areas of Mars, with a spatial resolution ranging from , and 400 spectra of Phobos at 700 m resolution. These observations made it possible to retrieve