Space & Science News Oct 20, 2026: Japan Heads for Phobos
Good evening, curious minds, and welcome to your space and science update from Alberta Radio! It's been a couple of weeks since our last space roundup, and we're back with a bigger menu: Japan just sent a spacecraft to grab a scoop of a Martian moon, NASA has new blades for Mars helicopters, an AI fed four million fossils is rethinking Earth's mass extinctions, a famous Siberian cave turned up a mystery Ice Age beast, and physicists found early-universe soup in tiny oxygen collisions. Let's dig in.
1. Japan Launches MMX to Bring Home a Piece of Phobos
Japan's space agency JAXA launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission on Monday, Oct. 19, at 3:41 p.m. EDT (1:41 p.m. MT) on the 10th flight of its H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center. JAXA confirmed the spacecraft separated from the rocket about 71 minutes after liftoff and is on its planned path to Mars.
MMX should reach Mars in August 2027 and spend about three years studying its two small moons, Phobos and Deimos. It carries IDEFIX, a small rover built by the French and German space agencies, which is planned to roll onto Phobos in late 2028 or early 2029. Then MMX will touch down twice to collect samples and bring them back to Earth in 2031. It would be the first sample ever returned from a moon of Mars, and it could finally settle whether Phobos is a captured asteroid or debris blasted off Mars long ago.
2. NASA's New Blades Could Let Mars Helicopters Fly 25x Farther
Ingenuity proved you can fly on Mars, but its longest hops were short. On Tuesday NASA highlighted a new rotor blade shape called roamx-0201, designed at NASA's Ames Research Center with Imperial College London and Japan's Nagoya University. It's thinner and asymmetrical, tuned for Mars' extremely thin air.
In simulations and wind tunnel tests, the new blade got about 19 to 43% more lift for the same drag than Ingenuity's blade and handled stalls much better. NASA says that could stretch a single flight from Ingenuity's 0.7 kilometres to as much as 18.7 kilometres while carrying science instruments. The research was published Sept. 22 in the AIAA Journal. NASA stresses the technology isn't ready for Mars yet, and its next Mars helicopters, the SkyFall trio set to launch in 2028, will use the proven design.
Sources: NASA | Imperial College London
3. AI Trained on 4 Million Fossils Rethinks Mass Extinctions
Paleontologists have trained an AI model on nearly four million fossil records, the way chatbots are trained on text, to rebuild a timeline of life on Earth across hundreds of millions of years. The reconstruction, called OneStrata, suggests three of the famous "Big Five" mass extinctions may have been gradual declines rather than sudden catastrophes.
The work was presented by Shuzhong Shen of Nanjing University at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver on Oct. 12, and reported by Nature on Oct. 20. It was shared at a conference, so treat it as early results, and some outside experts say detailed local records already exist and the impact may be less earth-shattering than claimed. Still, it's a fun one for Alberta, home to some of the best fossil beds on the planet in the Badlands.
Source: Nature
4. A Mystery Yak-Like Ice Age Animal From Denisova Cave
Denisova Cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains, famous for giving us the Denisovans, an extinct branch of the human family, has another surprise. Researchers pulled DNA from small bone fragments there and found they belong to a previously unknown large Ice Age mammal closely related to today's yak, a bovine species distinct from any known living or extinct one.
Source: Reuters via Devdiscourse
5. Early-Universe 'Soup' Spotted in Tiny Oxygen Smashups
Right after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a super-hot soup called quark-gluon plasma. Physicists usually recreate it by smashing heavy gold nuclei together, but the STAR experiment at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider found its signature in collisions of much smaller oxygen nuclei.
High-energy particles flying through the collisions were suppressed by about 20%, an effect called jet quenching that happens when they plough through the plasma. That's less than in gold collisions, as expected for a smaller system, but a clear sign the plasma forms even there. Since oxygen has also been collided at CERN's Large Hadron Collider, scientists can now compare the two machines directly. The results are in Physical Review Letters.
Source: Phys.org
Also This Week
ESA's Euclid space telescope has found its first previously unknown comet, spotted in images taken Sept. 16 to 24. Blue Origin is rebuilding its Florida launch pad after a May static-fire explosion and is aiming to fly New Glenn again by year's end. And a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare, Bandwagon-5, was scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday.
Source: Space Now weekly
That's your space and science update from Alberta Radio! Keep looking up, keep asking questions, and we'll catch you next time with more from the final frontier and beyond.
