DLR: A Rover for Phobos and Deimos

[bystander]

A Rover for Phobos and Deimos
German Aerospace Center (DLR) | 2019 Jun 19

Artist impression of the MMX rover ~ Credit: CNES

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Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos. These are the target of the Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which also involves international partners. Scheduled for launch in 2024. it will enter Mars orbit n 2025, and return samples to Earth in 2029. The spacecraft will carry a German-French rover that will land on either Phobos or Deimos and explore the surface in detail for several months. The scientists hope to gain new insights into the formation and evolution of the Solar System. At the International Paris Air Show in Le Bourget, the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), the Japanese space agency JAXA and the French space agency CNES agreed to further collaborate on the world’s first exploration of a minor Solar System body with a rover. ...

The MMX mission follows in the footsteps of the successful predecessor mission Hayabusa2, which explored the asteroid Ryugu. As part of the mission, on 3 October 2018, the Mobile Asteroid and Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander ‘hopped’ across the asteroid’s surface and sent spectacular images of a landscape strewn with boulders, stones and almost no dust back to Earth. On that same day, JAXA, DLR and CNES signed a first memorandum of understanding for cooperation within the MMX mission.

[neufer]

Surely they don't intend to send a standard looking wheeled rover
to a body with a surface gravity of just 0.57 cm/s²

[bystander]

First Tests for Landing the Martian Moons eXploration Rover
German Aerospace Center (DLR) | 2020 Sep 30

Prepa­ra­tions for a drop test ~ Credit: DLR

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The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission will have a German-French rover on board when it is launched in 2024. The rover will land on the Martian moon Phobos and explore its surface for approximately three months. Initial landing tests are currently underway at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Landing and Mobility Test Facility (LAMA) in Bremen. Using a first preliminary development model, the engineers are determining how robust the design of the approximately 25-kilogram rover must be to withstand an impact on the moon's surface after a free fall of about 40 to 100 metres.

"Under laboratory conditions, we drop the preliminary model of the MMX Rover from a height of five centimetres onto a changeable surface at various angles," explains Test Manager Michael Lange from the DLR Institute of Composite Structures and Adaptive Systems. "In this way, since Phobos has only approximately two thousandths of Earth's gravity at its surface, we can simulate the intensity of the impact for the rover structure." A particular challenge is that the free-falling rover could arrive at the surface in any orientation, possibly also hitting a rock. "To simulate this situation, we are using two hemispheres with diameters of two and nine centimetres that are positioned in a bed of sand, in addition to a flat plate," says Michael Wrasmann from the DLR Institute of Space Systems. "The exact location of the landing on the surface of Phobos is a matter of chance and we are using these analyses to prepare for the various possible scenarios." ...