I can’t say for certain that Japan’s space agency chose a prime spooky-season launch window for its mission to visit Martian moons. But it is pretty fitting for a trip to visit astronomical bodies named Phobos (fear, in Greek) and Deimos (dread) that no craft has survived.
Martian Moons eXploration—dubbed MMX, which is so much cooler than the alternative MME—launched on Monday in a bid to be the first mission to not only land on Phobos but also gather samples and return them to Earth. Three previous attempts by Russia have all failed en route to Mars, so a lot will have to go right to get there, let alone get back to Earth with the first-ever soil gathered from a moon that’s not our own.
But JAXA is as well positioned as any of the world’s space agencies to succeed. It has brought back samples from not one but two asteroids, and many of the same researchers are working on MMX.
“We know nothing about Phobos’ elemental composition,” says David Lawrence, a Johns Hopkins University researcher who leads the team that will use one of the MMX instruments to study the moon. “For me, that’s what’s exciting—making a measurement nobody’s done before.”
Aside from the pure wow factor, there are some tantalizing scientific reasons for undertaking the audacious mission. There are two competing theories for the moons’ origins. One is that Phobos and Deimos are captured asteroids, while the other is that they’re fragments of Mars blasted loose by an asteroid impact on the planet’s surface.
Bringing samples back to Earth will help answer the question of how the moons came to be. Regardless, researchers expect Phobos to have at least some Martian soil, and retrieving a sample will allow them to look at how the planet has evolved over billions of years. But we’ll have to wait a bit for those answers: Even if all goes according to JAXA’s plans, the samples won’t make it back to Earth until 2031.
Also on my radar: Nathan Fielder. The comedian answered all of WIRED global editorial director Katie Drummond’s questions about his new documentary You Can See Everything, which follows Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes prior to her incarceration. He also asked Katie about how she feels about the movie Elf. To say the interview contains multitudes is an understatement.
In addition to Katie getting the lowdown on the documentary, we’re also critically exploring WIRED’s coverage of Theranos. Startups haven’t stopped hyping themselves up in the intervening years; in fact, in some ways, the hype train has gotten more extreme. But then, that’s what makes reflecting on what we got wrong in our coverage then—and working to separate extraordinary science claims from reality—more important than ever.
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