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
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Reality
- Evidence70
- Adoption
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- Hype gap+20
- Incentives55
- Confidence72
Japan's MMX probe is due to launch Oct. 19 to fetch Phobos soil that tests two origin theories
Japan's MMX probe is due to launch on an H3 rocket on Oct. 19 to bring back more than 10 grams of Phobos soil. A sample rich in Martian material would favor a giant impact, and one matching known meteorites would favor capture, phys.org reports.
Reality
- Evidence60
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- Confidence55
Mercury's buried surface wrinkles suggest the planet shrank 10 to 30 percent more than estimated
A Geophysical Research Letters study says buried wrinkles suggest Mercury may have shrunk 10 to 30 percent more than experts thought. Lead author Gaku Nishiyama says the larger contraction suggests a core that started extremely hot and is mostly metal.
Reality
- Evidence50
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- Hype gap+15
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- Confidence45
NASA has posted about 800GB of Artemis II mission data, including more than 11,000 photos and videos and 8.5 hours of audio. Anyone can download it, though the raw archive is organized for researchers and a curated science page is the version built for everyone else.
Reality
- Evidence62
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- Hype gap+15
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- Confidence66
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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- Hype gap+35
- Incentives45
- Confidence60
Cassini's salty Enceladus grains look like shards of slowly frozen ocean droplets
Researchers led by Frank Postberg found sharply different salt mixtures across 961 Cassini spectra of salty Enceladus grains. Tokyo freezing experiments suggest each grain is a shard of a slowly frozen droplet, so the ocean's makeup shows in how often each salt appears.
Reality
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- Hype gap+8
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- Confidence50
University of Washington researchers put the dust in Mars's north polar surface ice near 3% by mass, down from earlier estimates as high as 25%. Cleaner ice is brighter and should vaporize more slowly, so the figure bears on Mars climate models.
Reality
- Evidence58
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- Hype gap+12
- Incentives25
- Confidence60
Mark Sykes's FOIA tally finds NASA research funding lost 30% of its value since 2011
Planetary scientist Mark Sykes rebuilt 15 years of NASA research and analysis spending from FOIA data and found it flat, down 30% in real value since FY2011. He says the shortfall is costing NASA scientists and ideas, a claim his dollar figures support only indirectly.
Reality
- Evidence55
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- Hype gap+30
- Incentives45
- Confidence50
Slow-frozen lab droplets sort their salts in a way that could explain Cassini's Enceladus grains
Institute of Science Tokyo researchers found that salts separate inside 200-micrometre lab droplets frozen at about 10 K a minute or slower. Slow freezing in the vents could explain Cassini's oddly varied Enceladus grains, though the droplets held salts and organics remain untested.
Reality
- Evidence50
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- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence45
Buried volcano beneath the Moon's Dewar swirl points to an ancient field of at least 11.4 microteslas
Anna Mittelholz of ETH Zurich and colleagues say a 60-km volcanic body under the Moon's Dewar swirl cooled in a field of at least 11.4 microteslas. They credit a core dynamo like Earth's, since the site's location makes an impact origin unlikely.
Reality
- Evidence55
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- Hype gap+10
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- Confidence50
Clay on Larissa and Galatea puts physical evidence under Triton's violent capture
JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's small inner moons and its rings, with no water ice. The likely source is the shattered interior of a much larger lost moon.
Reality
- Evidence64
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- Hype gap+15
- Incentives35
- Confidence62
Slowly freezing spray sorts Enceladus's ocean into single-substance ice grains
Frank Postberg's team finds that Enceladus plume droplets freeze slowly, sorting salts and organics into separate grains a few micrometers across. A probe would need to check many grains to find one holding microbial material, though that grain should be easy to read.
Reality
- Evidence50
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- Hype gap+20
- Incentives35
- Confidence55
A new model has Venus's 243-day spin pull a hypothetical moon down onto the planet
Stephen Kane checked his tidal code against the measured Earth-Moon system, then ran Venus with moons of half to ten lunar masses, and most of those runs ended with the moon on the surface. Whether Venus ever had one remains open.
Reality
- Evidence52
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- Hype gap+38
- Incentives62
- Confidence48
Stickney Crater's age splits Phobos' two origin stories by 1.6 billion years
Work presented at the European Geosciences Union assembly in Vienna models whether compressed rock sits beneath Phobos' largest crater, part of an effort to read the little moon's interior before Japan's MMX mission goes there to sample it.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives35
- Confidence45
Stephen Kane let hypothetical moons evolve around a Venus that turns once every 243 Earth days, and in most runs they spiralled inward and hit the planet. He says Venus needed no catastrophe to end up moonless.
Reality
- Evidence48
- Adoption15
- Hype gap+30
- Incentives55
- Confidence58
A Greenland comparison puts liquid nitrogen under Pluto's dark glacier streaks
The evidence for seeping nitrogen on Sputnik Planitia is a resemblance to wet ice in Landsat 9 images of Greenland, backed by simulations in which nitrogen ice several kilometers down melts and rises.
Reality
- Evidence45
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- Hype gap+30
- Incentives60
- Confidence50
Half-millimeter glass beads lower the silica estimate for Mercury's surface to 37 percent
A Max Planck team calibrated infrared readings against laboratory glasses of known composition and came out with less silicon dioxide on Mercury's surface than earlier estimates. How much less depends on how the release's 25 percent is read.
Reality
- Evidence54
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- Hype gap+20
- Incentives58
- Confidence52
Two Ryugu grains pin nitrogen to the asteroid's last drying brine
Kyoto University's analysis of two grains puts nitrogen chemistry in the last fluid to dry inside Ryugu's parent body, and the team is careful to say it inferred that sequence rather than watched it happen.
Reality
- Evidence66
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+22
- Incentives32
- Confidence58
High-pressure experiments rule carbon out as the missing light element in Mercury's core
Experiments at Liege and KU Leuven reproduced Mercury's core formation and produced a graphite crust 40 to 120 metres thick above a core holding under 0.5% carbon, far too little to explain the planet's density deficit.
Reality
- Evidence62
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- Hype gap+15
- Incentives58
- Confidence58
One oblique hit, two Deimos mysteries, and a moon weaker than anyone budgeted for
The first paper built on ESA Hera's Deimos flyby argues a single roughly 320-metre impactor did both jobs, and that the moon is porous and fragile. JAXA's MMX inherits that finding.
Reality
- Evidence52
- Adoption22
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives62
- Confidence55