Rover will do land-and-grab on Phobos

The Japanese space agency, JAXA, yesterday launched a pioneering mission to grab and return a sample from one of Mars’s moons, Phobos. The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) probe will drop a rover developed by the French space agency CNES and dubbed Idefix, after the little dog from the Asterix comics (Anglophones might know him as Dogmatix). Idefix weighs 25 kilograms on Earth, but will weigh only 12 grams — about the weight of one Earth pencil — when it lands on Phobos in August 2027.