A New Surface Atlas of Phobos Will Help JAXA's MMX Mission Collect its Samples

JAXA's Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is set to launch in October and will collect samples from Phobos, the largest moon of Mars. The researchers created a morphodynamic atlas of Phobos' surface to help scientists understand the dynamics of material movement on the moon. The atlas includes a digital terrain model (DTM) of Phobos, capturing features like grooves, lineaments, and landslides, and includes terrain with sparse impact craters, the dominating Stickney Crater, and different spectral units. The atlas helps explain how surface material moves on Phobos due to low gravity, orbital, and rotational forces.

The atlas identifies Regolith Migration Pathways (RMPs), which are preferred routes of regolith transport under the combined effects of self-gravity, centrifugal, and tidal accelerations. These pathways show how material moves across the surface, with black lines highlighting the RMPs. The study shows that material from the sub-Mars point has a different regolith history compared to the anti-Mars point, with the sub-Mars site having aged and well-mixed regolith from multiple sources. The atlas helps scientists understand where the samples will be collected and how the material will be distributed on Phobos.

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