A rocket is set to blast off towards one of Mars‘s moons tonight in an ambitious £262million mission.
The Japanese spacecraft, known as Martian Moons Exploration (MMX), will this evening begin its 300million-mile mission to Phobos – the larger of the Red Planet’s two satellites.
Its aim is to collect at least 10g of dust and rock from the moon’s surface, before heading back to Earth.
The mission is expected to return the first-ever samples collected from the vicinity of Mars, with tiny grains of material believed to contain a wealth of scientific information.
Experts hope the samples will finally settle a decades-old debate
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