While some private space agencies and government bodies like NASA are aiming to explore Mars, Japan’s own space agency is aiming for the Red Planet’s moons. Specifically, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) wants to send robots to Phobos and Deimos to explore the natural satellites’ surfaces.

According to the agency’s website, the plan is to send probes to the two moons in the 2020s. As to the mission objectives, the primary reason for landing on the space bodies is to find out where they came from.

“The primary mission objective is to distinguish between the two leading hypotheses for the origin of Phobos and Deimos,” the website reads. “The first of these suggests the moons are captured primitive asteroids, while the second proposes that they are the agglomerated fragments of a giant impact event on Mars. The second objective is to [characterize] the conditions on and around the moons. This includes surface processes on Phobos and Deimos, the nature of the circum-Martian environment (the region where objects orbit around the planet) and the global and temporal dynamics of Mars’s atmosphere, such as dust, ice, clouds and water vapour.”

Now, there are several important reasons for wanting to determine the various characteristics of the moons. As Futurism notes, in case Phobos or Deimos came from outside the solar system or are made of materials from outside the boundaries of the solar system, it would provide scientists with an insight regarding what is waiting out there.

The tentative date for the launch of the probe is September 2024, which is when the Earth and Mars will be nearest to each other. Should the launch prove successful, the probe will land on the moons sometime in 2025. The probe will then spend three years studying the moons before coming home in July of 2029.