JAXA's MMX is set to launch on an H3 rocket on 19 October and return at least ten grams of Phobos material to Earth in 2031, according to ESA. The sample is meant to help decide whether Mars's moons are captured asteroids or giant-impact debris.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishers
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- Operator 33%
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- Investor 22%
Reality
- Evidence70
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- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives55
- Confidence72
Researchers using Mars Express report that the 1,800 km Arsia Mons cloud appears in simulations only when water vapour freezes without dust seeds. If that holds, the air there reaches humidities long treated as theoretical, a conclusion that rests on a model's fit to one cloud.
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Reality
- Evidence55
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- Not scored
- Hype gap+35
- Incentives45
- Confidence60
Solar Orbiter flew through a large magnetic switchback and used the particles inside it to trace the kink to a source on the Sun's surface. The result comes from a single crossing, so it limits how switchbacks can begin but cannot yet say how most of them do.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives65
- Confidence55
NASA's next flagship survey telescope will watch hundreds of millions of stars for one-off gravitational blips. That is how you count Earth-mass planets you will never get to look at a second time.
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Reality
- Evidence62
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- Hype gap+15
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ESA says Webb's infrared image of NGC 7129 shows a 3.5-light-year cavity carved by outflows from one young star of 5 to 8 solar masses. The link between that star and the cavity rests on ESA's reading of a single snapshot.
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Reality
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- Confidence55
ESA cleared the joint European-Chinese Smile mission for science on 23 September, after 95 days of commissioning in orbit. Its aurora camera is recording now, while the X-ray imager meant to map the magnetopause waits for stray light to fade in mid-October.
Reality
- Evidence55
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ESA's Juice spacecraft needed one small nudge, from six correction slots set aside, to line up a 28 September Earth flyby that added 3.5 km/s. Its operators say the unburned propellant will go to observing Jupiter's icy moons; ESA has not said how much was saved.
Reality
- Evidence58
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- Confidence62
Hubble imaging and Gaia orbits separate a third population of ancient star clusters in the galaxy's inner regions, evidence of a dwarf galaxy swallowed about 11.8 billion years ago.
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Reality
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- Confidence55
Saturn's northern hexagon has looked the same for more than 40 years, so a second polygon that only shows up in images from 2023 onward hands atmospheric modellers a formation they can watch happen rather than a finished structure to explain.
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BepiColombo's transfer module let go on schedule, and the spacecraft ran the step without help from the ground. The two manoeuvres that decide whether the mission returns any Mercury data are still 79 and 97 days out.
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ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer takes speed and a new heading from Earth's gravity on 28 September, the third such encounter since launch, and one more Earth pass is still needed before it reaches Jupiter.
Reality
- Evidence78
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- Hype gap+12
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The new Hubble picture of NGC 4698 shows arms that stop short of the glowing center and a bulge tilted out of the disk, while the case that a small merger built that geometry rests on one short tail of hydrogen.
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Two years after the same team stopped at three to four Jupiter masses in this cloud, deeper Webb imaging and spectroscopy reached 0.19 percent of a solar mass, below where models of cloud collapse sit comfortably.
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Reality
- Evidence60
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- Confidence60