Astronomy and Space
Idefix (rover)
Idefix is a rover developed by the French space agency CNES and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in cooperation with the Japanese space agency JAXA for the planned Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to Phobos, a moon of Mars. The rover is designed to land on Phobos and explore its surface before the MMX spacecraft lands on the moon and collects samples for return to Earth. MMX is scheduled to launch in 2026. Idefix is a ~23 kg, solar-powered rover carrying a suite of instruments for surface and regolith investigations: the RAman spectrometer for MMX (RAX), a miniaturized infrared radiometer (miniRAD), and imaging systems that include a pair of navigation cameras and two downward-facing WheelCams to observe wheel–soil interactions at close range. The rover is a Franco–German development in cooperation with JAXA—DLR providing the structure, locomotion and thermal instruments, and CNES providing cameras, avionics, power, and communications—and is designed for at least 100 days of operations on Phobos. Deployment is planned after roughly 18 months of Phobos observations by the MMX spacecraft. The orbiter will release Idefix from about 40–100 m altitude into a ~100 m landing footprint; after autonomous uprighting and solar-array deployment, the rover will traverse at millimetre-per-second speeds to characterize local terrain, support landing-site assessment, and inform MMX sampling activities. Operations will be shared between control centers in Toulouse and Cologne, with all commands and telemetry relayed via the MMX spacecraft. The name Idefix, honoring the dog from the Asterix comics, was announced at the 2023 Paris Air Show.
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Beta Corvi.
2020.
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