Japan tests its Mars moon sample-return probe ahead of 2026 launch (photo)
Japan is putting its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) spacecraft through a series of tests ahead of its launch to Mars next year.
MMX is a complex mission to collect samples from the moon Phobos and deliver them to Earth to solve the riddle of the origin of the tiny Martian satellite.
The spacecraft has been put into a vacuum chamber to test its readiness for deep space, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced on May 15 via its official mission channel on the social media platform X.
"MMX is undergoing a thermal vacuum test, in which the spacecraft is placed in a vacuum chamber where the environment simulates outer space and the operation for each of the onboard instruments is checked," JAXA stated.
The image shows the spacecraft's return and exploration modules, while MMX's little IDEFIX rover can be seen in the center, attached to the exploration module. The 55-pound (25 kilograms) IDEFIX rover was developed by the German Aerospace Center (known by the German acronym DLR) and the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).
Related stories:
— New Japanese spacecraft aims to explore the mysterious moons of Mars
— Mars: Everything you need to know about the Red Planet
— Mars moons: Facts about Phobos and Deimos
A main objective of MMX is to determine whether Phobos and the smaller companion moon Deimos are captured asteroids, or formed from fragments blown into orbit after a giant impact struck Mars. The mission also aims to provide new insights into the history of the Red Planet and planetary formation in general across the wider solar system.
MMX is due to be launched on Japan's flagship H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center during the next Mars launch window, in November-December 2026. It was earlier scheduled to launch in the previous launch window in 2024, but this was delayed due to issues with the H3 rocket.
If all goes well, MMX will arrive in orbit around Mars in 2027 to begin mapping and analyzing Phobos and Deimos and search for a landing site. MMX will then land on Phobos in 2029 to collect around 0.35 oz (10 grams) of samples. These are expected to be delivered to Earth in 2031.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
8 hours ago
- Forbes
Legendary Hacker & Investor Pablos Holman's 1000x Deep Tech Future
Pablos Holman is a hacker, writ large. The first time he spoke for one of my events, in 2010, he captured an audience member's credit card information during a break and started making a purchase on stage. He didn't complete the purchase (or share the number), but he did make his point. When I'm puzzling over a truly far-out concept or epochal challenge, Holman is one of my go-to experts. He's spent his career hacking humanity's biggest challenges with organizations like Blue Origin and Intellectual Ventures. His new book, Deep Future, is a field guide to transformative technology and paradigm-shattering thinking. Fellow Technologists: 'Aim Higher!' Holman calls himself a 'Possibilist'—the future can be better, if we decide to build it. That ethos threads the book and echoes a theme I've written about for years: technology as the art of the possible. To do this well requires reframing problems, escaping established paradigms, and doing the hard work of real invention. Deep Future draws a sharp line between 'shallow tech' and 'deep tech.' Shallow tech enhances convenience. He bluntly proposes, 'If somebody makes an iPhone app to have weed delivered to their dorm room using drones, do we really have to call that tech?' Deep tech expands human capability by orders of magnitude. Holman challenges us: stop chasing 1% gains. 'Deep Tech is about finding the breakthroughs that make it possible to do things 10x, 100x, 1,000x faster, cheaper or better.' Mosquitoes Meet Lasers If you know Pablos, you know about the mosquito-zapping laser invented at Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures. The team took apart the malaria problem and tried something new: detect the wingbeat frequency—to distinguish it from other insects—of a female Anopheles in flight and shoot it down. 'We can, and will, eradicate malaria once and for all in our lifetimes. But not by reading the directions,' he the problem, prototype shamelessly and let physics do the heavy lifting. When the approach works—even once—you've expanded what's possible. The mosquito laser array wasn't intended to go to market. Many deep tech visions are. Read the book for dozens of compelling cases. Here are three. Deep Future relates the story of Holman's fund investing in Ladon Robotics, a company reenvisioning ocean-going shipping around autonomy and wind. Consider the economics: 'About five out of six dollars spent on a ship during its life is burned as fuel. This industry literally burns most of its operational expenditures.' Ladon's idea is deceptively simple: autonomous ships powered by wind, with sun-powered battery auxiliary propulsion for navigating harbors and periods with low winds. In other words, remove fuel from the costs. It's classic deep tech. It doesn't 'improve' shipping, it transforms it. Renewables stumble on intermittency and storage. Holman proposes to ensure the sun never sets on your solar farm. 'Put those solar panels on a rocket ship, blast them into space.' Orbital solar farms could intercept sunlight 24/7, receiving eight times as much energy as they would on the Earth's surface. The system could deliver electricity via radio waves to receiving antennas on the ground, 'even in the middle of the night or during a snowstorm.' A decade ago, this would have read like a comic book. Falling launch costs and mature RF beam-forming technologies make this increasingly feasible. Holman argues, 'All the technology to do this exists already. No breakthroughs necessary.' It's a plausible path to low-cost power—precisely the kind of paradigm flip deep tech is meant to deliver. While others have proposed such a solution, Holman's venture firm Deep Future has invested in Virtus Solis, a team endeavoring to make it happen. Some of the best solutions have been around for centuries. Consider concrete, civilization's foundation and one of our dirtiest materials. Holman highlights the work of MIT's Admir Masic, which helps explain why Ancient Rome's Pantheon still stands: lime clasts throughout Roman concrete act as self-healing reservoirs. 'When water seeps in, it activates the lime and fills the cracks. It is self-healing concrete that gets stronger with time.' Longer-lasting infrastructure with 10% - 50% lower lifecycle carbon emissions. With cement accounting for approximately 8% – 13% of global CO₂ emissions, this matters. Unlike most deep tech solutions, this one has thousands of years of proof behind it. Massive Thinking, Brutal Simplicity Holman's examples—mosquito lasers, autonomous shipping, space-based solar, self-healing concrete--exhibit how to see differently: select huge problems that matter, don't let current reality get in the way, discover opportunities the incumbents ignore. While Deep Future is about audacious thinking and enormously challenging technology, much of Holman's thinking illustrates a skill I call 'brutal simplicity.' It's an approach we can all use. Here are three questions to help you do so: The first question seeks clarity before seeking solutions. Do we really understand the problem? The second tests whether we have the right problem in mind. The third question challenges us to seek as simple--though not necessarily easy--a solution as possible. Consider one of Deep Future's examples. Problem: How can we generate clean, reliable electricity at scale? Blast solar panels into space and beam the power back to Earth. Eh, voila: Virtus Solis. Ignore The Boogeymen: Build Anyway Big ideas attract bigger anxieties. Holman devotes a chapter to our habit of telling 'boogeyman' stories about new tools—nuclear, psychedelics, AI, you name it. His advice? Research, experiment, invent—then regulate the real risks we discover. The future won't be built by the skeptics. It belongs to pragmatic optimists who make better stories true. While I wouldn't expect mosquito lasers at your next BBQ, you'll likely discover a lot of you-heard-it-here-firsts in Holman's book. Thanks to the Possibilists amongst us, some of these monstrously hard, brutally simple visions will one day become reality.
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
This real 'Eye of Sauron' spits out ghost particles in space. Here's what it looks like
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. For about 15 years, a powerful radio telescope on planet Earth dutifully recorded data about a location in the cosmos billions of light-years away from us — and, at last, astronomers managed to stitch together those extensive observations to reveal a full picture of what this telescope has been looking at. It's … the Eye of Sauron! Well, sort of. Though the image you're seeing bears a striking resemblance to the jarring symbol associated with the main villain in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels by J.R.R. Tolkien, it's actually something far more fear-inducing. At face value, at least. What you're looking at is actually a blazar, which requires a couple of layers to explain. Out in the universe, there are these things called quasars, which refer to the extremely luminous centers of active galaxies (meaning they emit a lot of electromagnetic radiation) that are powered by supermassive black holes. These galactic cores are called active galactic nuclei, or AGNs; and in fact, the monster black holes powering these phenomena can also funnel matter outward in the form of highly energetic jets of particles moving at nearly the speed of light. It's all very intense. Quasars can be so bright that they outshine the collective light of every single star in the galaxy surrounding them. Blazars, on the other hand, are pretty much quasars — except with those supermassive-black-hole-rooted jets pointing within 10 degrees of our planet. That doesn't exactly mean we're about to be obliterated by a jet, though. Remember how I said the fear remains at face value? The only reason we're seeing the jet pointing straight toward us is because of our vantage point, and this doesn't necessarily increase its danger. Still, blazars, because of this serendipitous orientation, tend to appear even brighter than the already ridiculously bright quasars. Not that it matters, but Sauron would sure love them. "When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning," Yuri Kovalev, lead author of the study and principal investigator of the Multi-messenger Studies of Extragalactic Super-colliders project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR), said in a statement. "We have never seen anything quite like it — a near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet, pointing straight at us." "This alignment causes a boost in brightness by a factor of 30 or more," explains Jack Livingston, a study co-author at MPIfR. "At the same time, the jet appears to move slowly due to projection effects — a classic optical illusion." And this particular blazar could be the one blazar to rule them all. Scientists have formed a clear image of it using observations from the Very Long Baseline Array (named PKS 1424+240), and it may very well be one of the brightest sources of high-energy gamma rays and cosmic neutrinos ever observed. Neutrinos are mind-blowing items themselves, while we're at it. They're nicknamed "ghost particles" because they're invisible, zippy bits that penetrate the entirety of our cosmos yet remain tremendously difficult to detect. Trillions of these particles are flowing through your body as you read this, but you can't tell because they don't interact with any of the particles that make up your body. They slide right through. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole, specifically built to pin down neutrinos, is actually the institution that discovered PKS 1424+240 in the first place because of its super high neutrino emission levels. Solving this puzzle confirms that active galactic nuclei with supermassive black holes are not only powerful accelerators of electrons, but also of protons — the origin of the observed high-energy neutrinos," concludes Kovalev. Reconstructing the spectacular blazar, according to the discovery team, also allows astronomers to peer directly into the "heart" of this jet — and that could be great news for scientists trying to understand the dynamics of these awesome objects. Kovalev explains that it confirms AGNs with supermassive black holes don't only accelerate electrons (negatively charged particles that make up atoms) but also protons. This is a big find, the researcher explains, because that explains the origin of the high-energy neutrinos PKS 1424+240 appears to be spitting out. A study about these results was published on Tuesday (Aug. 12) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters. Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
14 hours ago
- New York Times
These Science Fiction Novels Will Take You on an Epic Journey
Science fiction is a genre of vectors. Its stories are arrows tipped with science, fletched with 'what-if' and shot out of the present into the future. Some are warning shots, exposing the weak spots in our politics or social architecture. Many provide the kind of escapist fun I'd inhale as a kid — under the covers, by flashlight. And then there are the rare few that pierce the future square in the chest, a note dangling from the shaft that reads, 'I told you so.' For me, it is the science fiction cloaked in myth that carries the most power. Lest your mind careen toward elves on spaceships, let me clarify: I'm not talking about a subgenre here, or about cross-pollination with fantasy. For me, myth is a tone, imbued with the gravity of fate and eternal truth. Whether a lullaby of mankind's ancient cradle or a requiem for the collapse of stellar empires, these tales sing out from the mist to remind us of our nature. For the most part, the heroes of these novels inhabit dark, decaying worlds. Their epic journeys through that darkness have often helped me find the light. Here are a few of my favorites. The Book of the New Sun Wolfe's four-part saga feels like a relic of another epoch — scribbled in the midnight hollows of an abbey by a mad theologian, or summoned into being by the high priest of some fallen empire and beamed back to us across the millenniums. Set on a distant, dying Earth, the book (which was actually written by a Korean War vet living in Illinois in the 1980s) follows Severian, a torturer's apprentice exiled for the crime of mercy, as he wanders a world so far in the future that it has relapsed into medievalism. Science has become sorcery. Spaceports crumble to ruins. I have read this book at least five times and still struggle to succinctly sum it up. It is dense, archaic, feverish and beautiful — a meditation on the tragedy of mortals on an immortal stage that will haunt you long after its final page. Let Us Help You Find Your Next Book: Science Fiction Our Favorite Sci-Fi Reads Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
