Martian Moons Exploration Martian Moons Exploration The Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) is a robotic space probe set for launch in 2024 to bring back the first samples from Mars' largest moon Phobos. Developed by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and announced in 9 June 2015, MMX will land and collect samples from Phobos once or twice, along with conducting Deimos flyby observations and monitoring Mars' climate. The mission aims to provide key information to help determine whether the Martian moons are captured asteroids or the result of a larger body hitting Mars. The spacecraft will enter orbit around Mars, then transfer to
Solar System model Solar System model Solar System models, especially mechanical models, called "orreries", that illustrate the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System have been built for centuries. While they often showed relative sizes, these models were usually not built to scale. The enormous ratio of interplanetary distances to planetary diameters makes constructing a scale model of the Solar System a challenging task. As one example of the difficulty, the distance between the Earth and the Sun is almost 12,000 times the diameter of the Earth. If the smaller planets are to be easily visible to