An ambitious mission will explore the moons of Mars, and bring back the first ever sample from Phobos.

An artist's conception of JAXA's MMX mission at Phobos. JAXA

A two-stage, H3-24L rocket lit up the predawn skies over Tanegashima Space Center on the southern tip of Japan early on Tuesday, October 20th (3:41 p.m. EDT on October 19th), carrying a mission headed for the Red Planet: the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX).

The launch went flawlessly, and spacecraft payload separation occurred at 1 hour and 11 minutes after launch.

The mission is complex, set to explore the moons of Mars with a series of flybys past Deimos before rendezvous with and landing on Phobos. If all goes well, MMX will collect and return a sample from Phobos and return it to Earth. The agency's goal is nothing less than to understand the potato-shaped moons' origins.

MMX's journey to Mars.

JAXA

This will be the second try for JAXA to field a Mars mission.…