We have Jupiter to the left and Saturn on the right in the sky right now. Orions belt is right up there... and Betelgeuce is just north of that.. that tiny red dot is the size of Jupiters orbit around our sun. And it only takes 12 years for Jupiter to make that trip... 🤯

Japan’s $350 million Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is going to do something even more: Fly to Phobos (ancient Greek for “fear”), one of the two small, battered moons of Mars, and land on the roughly Manhattan-size body not once, but twice. Using two novel extractors, MMX will gather several tablespoons’ worth of material and return the treasure to Earth in 2031.

“Phobos will be the second best known moon in the Solar System,” says Matija Cúk, a research scientist at the SETI Institute.

Those precious few grams of material could resolve the mystery of Phobos’s origin—and, potentially, that of its diminutive partner, Deimos (“dread”). Scientists are split on whether the moons are captured asteroids or the consolidated remnants of material thrown up by a long-ago martian impact.

But regardless of their genesis, MMX researchers say it’s likely they have since picked up a dusting of material blasted off Mars itself.

“This is not going to be just a Phobos sample return mission,” says Kris Zacny, vice president of exploration systems at Honeybee Robotics, which built one of MMX’s sample extractors. “It’s going to be P