Russia will launch a mission to deliver soil from Mars' moon Phobos

NPO them. WITH. A. Lavochkin (part of Roscosmos) plans to launch the Russian interplanetary station Boomerang, which is supposed to deliver soil from the satellite of Mars - Phobos. The launch is tentatively scheduled for the early 2030s.

This will be the first stage of the Expedition-M project to explore Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. They intend to study them both by remote and contact methods. That is, the plans are to descend onto bodies in the absence of gravity.

They want to launch an apparatus weighing 6.5 tons from the Vostochny cosmodrome using the Angara launch vehicle. It must fly to Mars and enter its orbit, as well as approach its moons. One of the main tasks of the mission is the delivery of samples of Phobos matter to Earth.

Previously reported, that in the near future Germany, France and Japan plan to study this satellite of the Red Planet as part of the joint Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission. To do this, countries are developing a miniature IDEFIX rover. The work was supposed to be completed by the summer of 2023, but there is still no information about the degree of its readiness and the launch date.