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Mars

The second interplanetary ISAS mission is Planet-B, a Mars orbital mission due for launch in 1998 with arrival at the Red Planet in 1999. The primary goal of the 35-kg payload was to study the interaction of the solar wind with Mars' atmosphere. Mars has a very weak magnetic field as compared with Earth and all other planets except Venus, thus it is suspected that the unobstructed solar wind strips away much of the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft weighed approximately 540 kg at launch with a bus diameter of 2.0 m. The spin-stabilized (7.5 rpm) Planet-B also featured two solar arrays capable of producing up to 200 W in Mars orbit, a 5-m long mast, a 1.7-m long boom, and four wire antennas about 25 min length. Twelve principal instruments were selected to measure the local particles and fields in addition to mapping the Martian surface from altitudes ranging from 150 km to 30,000 km (References 143-148).

NOZOMI (PLANET-B) was Japan's first Mars explorer and its main mission was to research Martian upper atmosphere by focusing on the interaction with solar wind. On July 4, 1998, the explorer was launched by M-V-3 rocket from Kagoshima Space Center in Uchinoura. NOZOMI performed a lunar swing-by twice on August 24 and December 8, 1998. On December 20, 1998, it performed a powered swing-by of earth at around 1,000 km, the nearest point from the earth, but due to a defective thrust valve, it had insufficient thrust. Fuel consumption was excessive as a consequence of the change in flight course, and it became impossible to insert the explorer into orbit around Mars. Later, the explorer’s arrival at Mars was postponed from October 1999 to January 2004. NOZOMI performed the earth swing-by twice more in December 2002 and June 2003 to enter the orbit toward Mars. In April 2003, however, there were insoluble failures in the communication and thermal-control systems. Finally, to prevent NOZOMI from crashing on Mars, the mission team changed the explorer’s flight course on the night of December 9. 2003. NOZOMI became an artificial planet that flies forever in orbit around the Sun near that of Mars.

Japan's space agency JAXA aims to bring back to Earth up to 10 grams of sand from the surface of a Martian moon, by a probe to be launched in 2024. JAXA officials announced the details of the planned project during an online news conference on 19 August 2021. Under the project, called Martian Moons eXploration, or MMX, a probe is to land on the moon Phobos and carry surface samples back to Earth in 2029.

JAXA officials said around 0.1 percent of the surface sand on Phobos is believed to have come from Mars, raising the possibility that the samples will contain substances that originated on the planet. Researchers will examine whether the samples contain organic substances derived from living things or other evidence that life existed on Mars. Phobos is one of Mars's two moons, and orbits 9,000 kilometers from the planet.

JAXA's targeted 10 grams of surface samples is twice the amount brought back by another JAXA probe, Hayabusa2, from the surface of an asteroid in December 2020. MMX Project Manager Kawakatsu Yasuhiro said the project is based on expertise that JAXA has accumulated through years of asteroid exploration efforts. He said the mission would be the first ever to bring back samples from the Martian system.