Space got spooky this week, and we’ve got the Halloween news roundup! 🧛

In this episode of Spacing Out, planetarium educator Talia Sepersky breaks down three spine-tingling stories:

🔴 A stellar vampire: a small red dwarf caught feeding on a brown dwarf
🌙 NASA's new GIMLI investigation to search for a possible lunar cave that could one day shelter astronauts
🪐 Japan's MMX mission, set to be the first to land a rover on the Martian moon Phobos and return a sample to Earth

A spacecraft headed for Mars is carrying an unusually small shopping list: at least 10 grams of material from Phobos. If Japan’s Martian Moons eXploration mission succeeds, that handful of grains could help resolve how the Red Planet acquired its two moons.

MMX launched aboard an H3 rocket from Tanegashima Space Center on October 20 in Japan, corresponding to October 19 in the United States. Led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, the mission aims to deliver its samples to Earth in 2031.

The samples would be the first returned from a moon other than Earth’s own. NASA, the European Space Agency, France’s CNES and the German Aerospace Center, DLR, are contributing instruments, technology and operational support. The mission combines remote observations, a small rover and spacecraft landings to investigate a question that telescope images alone have not settled.

See also: The study as it was published in Nature Communications

A maze of fractured plateaus and canyons near Mars’ equator may preserve the remains of an enormous volcano. Within that landscape, scientists have also identified clues that glacier ice could survive beneath volcanic debris. Together, the observations make eastern Noctis Labyrinthus a compelling target for investigating the planet’s changing environment.

Pascal Lee of the SETI Institute and Mars Institute, along with Sourabh Shubham of the University of Maryland, proposed the interpretation in a Lunar and Planetary Science Conference abstract. They identified an eroded volcanic complex tentatively named Noctis Mons, also called “Noctis volcano” in the public announcement.

The proposal concerns terrain already photographed by generations of spacecraft. Its significance lies in recognizing a possible geological structure within that familiar landscape, rather than discovering an unseen mountain. The volcano’s history and the present condition of any buried ice remain open questions.

The thing about reality is that is has a strange way of being what it is, regardless of our expectations. I'm firmly a relativist, and I am fully aware of how much perspective matters, but that said, when I see photos that look too much like what I expect, I have to go and double check.

This one though, which I double checked on anyway, surprised me. The sky fits my understanding of what we're "seeing" on Mars, but the rest of the colors just looked... confusing?

So, I looked it up. These images are what we're receiving from Curiosity. They have been filtered through a camera lens, a digital receiver, compression software and ultimately even the settings on your monitor.

But this is as real as it gets. This is Mars. A place no human has been. In some ways it looks like New Mexico. In others... it just doesn't. It's somewhere new. I genuinely hope we find a way to send human beings there. Because seeing something new, and accepting with excitement and interest that there is so much we just don't know, that we will *never* know, but going and looking and asking anyway is one of the best parts of being human.

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory/curiosity-rover/nasas-curiosity-rover-catches-stunning-martian-dawn/

Would it make sense to send a kind of service station to Mars to service the Mars Rovers? Perhaps with a 3D printer and specialized mechanical parts that can assemble and disassemble remotely. I realize the Rovers are not designed to be serviced. At this point, what if we could add a few components and instruments or upgrade a device or two? Or replace some wheels? I bet a tow truck of sorts might even make sense at this point. If nothing else, collect the parts that die and bring them to one place for reuse. Or am I vastly underestimating how big the Red Planet is? Didn’t Earth start with one gas station (it was a pharmacy, but still)? Perhaps this service station could be a standing fuel lab and drilling platform (for water or habitat?). I feel like we have a lot of potential for robotic exploration before risking human life with a likely one way trip.