{"id":126224,"date":"2021-08-14T17:22:17","date_gmt":"2021-08-15T00:22:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/phobos-why-the-largest-martian-moon-may-reveal-alien-life"},"modified":"2021-08-14T17:22:17","modified_gmt":"2021-08-15T00:22:17","slug":"phobos-why-the-largest-martian-moon-may-reveal-alien-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/08\/phobos-why-the-largest-martian-moon-may-reveal-alien-life","title":{"rendered":"Phobos: Why the largest Martian moon may reveal alien life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/phobos-why-the-largest-martian-moon-may-reveal-alien-life3.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Why an upcoming mission to Phobos may reveal something spectacular.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Both NASA and the European Space Agency are operating or planning major missions to \u2014 and back from \u2014 the Red Planet in a hunt for signs the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/science\/mars-water-mystery-solved\">once wet planet<\/a> also hosted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/science\/perseverance-rover-begins-its-hunt-for-ancient-microbial-life\">microbial life<\/a> forms.<\/p>\n<p>But it\u2019s possible the best place to look for life on Mars isn\u2019t on Mars at all.<\/p>\n<p>In a <a href=\"https:\/\/science.sciencemag.org\/content\/373\/6556\/742\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\">new perspective<\/a> published Thursday in the journal <em>Science<\/em>, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) scientists<a href=\"https:\/\/members.elsi.jp\/~hyodo\/English\/index.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\"> Ryuki Hyodo<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/tomohirousui\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Tomohiro Usui<\/a> explain why JAXA believes the Martian moon Phobos could provide a unique opportunity to assess whether Mars ever contained life, and how the space agency\u2019s upcoming <a href=\"https:\/\/www.isas.jaxa.jp\/en\/missions\/spacecraft\/developing\/mmx.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer\">Martian Moons eXploration<\/a> (MMX) mission plans to test that hypothesis in 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why an upcoming mission to Phobos may reveal something spectacular. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are operating or planning major missions to \u2014 and back from \u2014 the Red Planet in a hunt for signs the once wet planet also hosted microbial life forms. But it\u2019s possible the best place to look for [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":631,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-126224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/631"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}