A University of Tokyo-led team finds Ryugu's sodium in clay and about 90% of its chlorine in serpentine, implying water a hundred times less salty than the sea. A Kyoto-led team had read a brine.
A Moon clock gains about 56 microseconds a day on Earth clocks, about 17 km of navigation error per day if uncorrected. The CGPM's lunar time draft seeks one reference scale and never mentions optical clocks.
An Osaka-led Japan-US team tells left- and right-handed amino acids apart one molecule at a time. Soai's Nobel shows a tilt can grow from chance, and asteroids Ryugu and Bennu show none, so detectors must read both.
NEC plans several hundred laser-linked satellites, the Yomiuri reports. Japan's Kirari made a two-way laser link in 2005, but Starlink now has about 11,100. Why Japan still wants its own.
An international team used NAOJ's ATERUI III to show how a newborn black hole could look like one of Webb's little red dots. NAOJ's Japanese release says 'closing in'; its English one says 'explained.'
A Hokkaido University-led study says rough terrain hides Mercury's own tectonic wrinkles, and that past estimates missed up to 30 percent of the contraction. BepiColombo arrives to test it on November 21.
A Japanese team found ammonium, nitriles and sodium nitrate clustered around the salt veins in Hayabusa2's Ryugu grains, which reframes the 75-fold gap between Bennu's water-extractable ammonia and Ryugu's.
JAXA has set MMX for launch at 4:41:03 a.m. on October 20, 2026. The probe lands on Phobos, collects at least 10 grams and returns in fiscal 2031, chasing a first from the Martian system.
Cold sleep was a movie prop. Then ESA calculated that a hibernating crew would cut a Mars spacecraft's mass by a third, and a Japanese lab found the brain switch. With humans, it is still a matter of hours.
ispace and Mitsubishi Heavy will launch the ULTRA lunar lander on an H3 rocket in 2028, with no rideshare. Of the 18.7 billion yen Mission 3 expects to bring in, 12 billion is a government subsidy.
A lump of iron from a Toyama riverbed turned out to be a meteorite. Enomoto Takeaki had five swords forged from it in 1898, and the same rock later served as a reference for researchers analysing Tutankhamun's dagger.