Mario Nawfal(@MarioNawfal):🇯🇵🇺🇸 Japan is going where no one has gone before: a moon of Mars... and back again with souvenirs JAXA’s $350 million mission, with $87 million chipped in by NASA, launched Tuesday on a five-year round trip to Phobos, a 17-mile space potato that might be a captured asteroid or a chunk blasted off Mars itself. Russia tried the same thing in 2011 and never left Earth orbit. Japan’s Hayabusa probes already brought asteroid dust home twice, so the country with the thinnest headlines in space is about to answer a question NASA has been asking since the 1970s. Source: WSJ / Writer: Daniel

2026.10.20 04:15

🇯🇵🇺🇸 Japan is going where no one has gone before: a moon of Mars... and back again with souvenirs JAXA’s $350 million mission, with $87 million chipped in by NASA, launched Tuesday on a five-year round trip to Phobos, a 17-mile space potato that might be a captured asteroid or a chunk blasted off Mars itself. Russia tried the same thing in 2011 and never left Earth orbit. Japan’s Hayabusa probes already brought asteroid dust home twice, so the country with the thinnest headlines in space is about to answer a question NASA has been asking since the 1970s. Source: WSJ / Writer: Daniel