The Story Thus Far

MarMoSet was born just over a year ago. In December of 2015, while talking to a friend about the Google Lunar XPrize, I remembered that it's theoretically easier to land on Mars's moons than our own. For fun, we began looking into what it would take to send a small mission to the Martian moons.

Once we discovered other ambitious CubeSat missions and the technology that enabled them, we realized that such a mission was actually possible. This led us to start taking the mission seriously and look into the details of such a mission.

While researching work being done on similar missions, I came across iCubeSat, a workshop on interplanetary CubeSat missions, science, and technology. I submitted an abstract and ended up giving a presentation at Oxford in late May. You can find that presentation here.

In July we attended The Third International Conference on the Exploration of Phobos and Deimos. All the presentations from there are available at the site. Most importantly, we learned that SpaceX's Red Dragon mission has up to  500 kg available for secondary payloads, and that JAXA is planning a Phobos sample return to launch in 2022. We also met with Deep Space Industries to discuss their asteroid prospector missions.

In November, after two months of trying to get in contact with SpaceX, I got an answer from an engineer leading  the Red Dragon program confirming that our mission could piggyback to Mars on the Red Dragon.

We also discovered new propulsion systems and research that enabled us to start looking more in-depth at our mission plan.

We're now working on contacting researchers and on creating a detailed reference mission, as well as making the work we're doing more available to the public through this blog.

Coming soon, posts detailing:
Mission rationale! Why do we even want to go to Phobos?
Spacecraft systems! First on the list: propulsion!
Mission profile! What even IS MarMoSet?

-Daniel