Surface environment of Phobos and Phobos simulant UTPS

• Published in: Earth, Planets and Space
• Main Authors: Miyamoto, Hideaki, Niihara, Takafumi, Wada, Koji, Ogawa, Kazunori, Senshu, Hiroki, Michel, Patrick, Kikuchi, Hiroshi, Hemmi, Ryodo, Nakamura, Tomoki, Nakamura, Akiko M., Hirata, Naoyuki, Sasaki, Sho, Asphaug, Erik, Britt, Daniel T., Abell, Paul A., Ballouz, Ronald-Louis, Banouin, Olivier S., Baresi, Nicola, Barucci, Maria A., Biele, Jens, Grott, Matthias, Hino, Hideitsu, Hong, Peng K., Imada, Takane, Kameda, Shingo, Kobayashi, Makito, Libourel, Guy, Mogi, Katsuro, Murdoch, Naomi, Nishio, Yuki, Okamoto, Shogo, Ota, Yuichiro, Otsuki, Masatsugu, Otto, Katharina A., Sakatani, Naoya, Shimizu, Yuta, Takemura, Tomohiro, Terada, Naoki, Tsukamoto, Masafumi, Usui, Tomohiro, Willner, Konrad
• Other Authors: Joseph Louis LAGRANGE (LAGRANGE), Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) (UNS), COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019) (COMUE UCA)-Université Côte d'Azur (UCA)-Université Côte d'Azur (UCA)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire d'études spatiales et d'instrumentation en astrophysique (LESIA (UMR_8109)), Institut national des sciences de l'Univers (INSU - CNRS)-Observatoire de Paris, Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Sorbonne Université (SU)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Université Paris Cité (UPCité), Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO)
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2021
• Subjects: MMX; Phobos; Deimos; Surface environment; Simulant; [SDU]Sciences of the Universe [physics]; Tagish; The Landing; Tagish Lake
• Online Access: https://hal-obspm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/obspm-03600678; https://hal-obspm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/obspm-03600678/document; https://hal-obspm.ccsd.cnrs.fr/obspm-03600678/file/s40623-021-01406-3.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1186/s40623-021-01406-3

International audience The Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission will study the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, Mars, and their environments. The mission scenario includes both landing on the surface of Phobos to collect samples and deploying a small rover for in situ observations. Engineering safeties and scientific planning for these operations require appropriate evaluations of the surface environment of Phobos. Thus, the mission team organized the Landing Operation Working Team (LOWT) and Surface Science and Geology Sub-Science Team (SSG-SST), whose view of the Phobos environment is summarized in this paper. While orbital and large-scale characteristics of Phobos are relatively well known, characteristics of the surface regolith, including the particle size-distributions, the packing density, and the mechanical properties, are difficult to constrain. Therefore, we developed several types of simulated soil materials (simulant), such as UTPS-TB (University of Tokyo Phobos Simulant, Tagish Lake based), UTPS-IB (Impact-hypothesis based), and UTPS-S (Simpler version) for engineering and scientific evaluation experiments.