Sunday, February 11, 2007

Moon Rocks? Try Martian Moon Rocks

This article talks about a concept mission to Phobos, and how the UK are thinking of doing it. They want to send a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, have another craft be launched from it to land on Phobos, run tests on the moon, capture rocks, launch off of the moon and be captured by the orbiting craft, and then return home. To me, that sounds like a lot of technical problems just for getting moon rocks. But, they have to practice all this stuff first before they try it on Mars first. They stress that the whole landing on a planet and then getting back off thing is really hard, and that's why they want to practice it on a low-gravity target first. They're thinking about launching in 2016.

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