A Japanese space mission is about to launch towards Mars. But it will not land on the planet itself. Instead, the Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission will focus on Phobos, the bigger of Mars’s two small moons.

The mission will lift off on Monday October 19 at 20:41 BST on an H3 rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center, in the south of Japan.

This will start a five-year mission, during which the spacecraft will orbit and explore Phobos, deploy a lander, touch down and collect soil and small pebbles. In a world first, these samples will be delivered to Earth for study in laboratories.

MMX is led by the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), in collaboration with the US, France, Germany and the European Space Agency (Esa). The overall science objective is to unravel the origins of the two Martian moons, the smaller of which is called Deimos. Mission scientists also want to examine the wider evolution of Mars and its local environment in space.

We still have no clear understanding of how the red planet got its moons. These natural satellites could have been hapless asteroids that were passing by Mars when they got captured by its gravity.

Another possibility is that that they formed when an asteroid collided with Mars, causing rocky material to be thrown out into space. Gradually, this material coalesced into Phobos and Deimos. The MMX mission will give us Phobos’s chemical composition, which could help distinguish between theories.

Grabbing samples from Phobos will be no easy task, however. Russia tried this in 2011 with its Phobos Grunt mission. The spacecraft launched successfully to low Earth orbit, but failed to fire its engines to send it toward Mars.

However, Jaxa is well placed to succeed. The space agency has already proved that it can return samples from asteroids with its Hayabusa space missions, which lasted from 2003-10 (Hayabusa) and 2018-20 (Hayabusa 2).

MMX will trial sophisticated sampling techniques designed for Phobos’s low gravity. The moon has about 0.1% the gravitational pull that Earth does. This means that a human on Phobos could jump a distance of 1.5 km horizontally without much effort.

The mission will also be a test of communication between the spacecraft and a newly developed ground station. After launch and deployment, MMX will take a year to reach Mars, arriving in August 2027. It will first circle the red planet before slipping into orbit around Phobos about a month later.

The spacecraft consists of three modules with distinct functions: a propulsion module to get MMX into orbit around Mars, an exploration module with landing and sample collection gear and a return module to deliver the sample to Earth.

The mission will make use of 13 science instruments to explore Phobos. High resolution cameras called Tengoo and Orochi will map the surface and a laser altimeter (Lidar) will build up a picture of the moon’s contours. Lidar uses laser pulses to measure the distance from the spacecraft to features on the surface.

An infrared spectrograph called MIRS will survey Phobos’s minerals, while a gamma ray and neutron detector, called Megane, will determine the moon’s elemental composition. From a greater distance, MMX will also gather data on Mars’s smaller moon Deimos.

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Read more: How did Mars get its moons? Japan’s MMX space mission aims to solve the puzzle

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The instruments will send back data that controllers will use to decide where and how to land the spacecraft on Phobos.

In early 2029, the MMX exploration module will deploy a small microwave oven-sized rover called Idefix, which has been developed jointly by Jaxa, the French space agency Cnes and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Idefix will drop down onto Phobos’ surface from between 40 and 100m in altitude.

The rover will then right itself and travel over the surface during an operational period expected to last about 100 days. It will be using several sensors, including a Raman spectrometer and radiometer, to make a final call about where the exploration module should land.

In 2030, the module will swoop down and land on Phobos, remaining on its surface for about 2.5 hours. It will be able to extract samples from the surface once or possibly twice by landing again at a different location. The ability to sample from more than one place on Phobos is vital to understanding the moon’s composition.

The exploration module will use either an instrument called the C-sampler to drill a core or a device knowns as the P-sampler, which blows a jet of nitrogen gas to blast soil and loose pebbles off the surface and into a sample collection chamber.

The C-sampler would be able to collect a core from up to 2cm below the surface. This would provide the mission with a sample composition unaltered by solar radiation, which causes chemical changes to planetary surfaces over time. The P-sampler is a back-up option, but carries some small risk of toppling the spacecraft in low gravitational fields like the one on Phobos.

Having gathered at least 10 grams of material, the spacecraft will leave the Martian moon, separating from its landing gear. It will then travel back to Earth, arriving in 2031. On its approach, the spacecraft will eject its sample probe, which will then descend through Earth’s atmosphere. It will land using parachutes in Australia, where it will be recovered and transported to Japan.

A potential side-benefit of the mission is that samples from Phobos might also include material from Mars. Phobos closely orbits the red planet and is thought to be constantly hoovering up Martian soil. This soil is thought to be regularly ejected from the planet’s surface by asteroid impacts.

MMX could therefore be considered a lite-version of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. MSR, a collaboration between the US and European space agencies, would have sent rock samples from the Martian surface to Earth. However, budgetary pressures led to the programme being effectively cancelled by US Congress.

If scientists get lucky with the samples from MMX, they might get a nice consolation prize.

Daniel Brown does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI.

Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – are criticised for distracting from real concerns and threats. AI is energy hungry, environmentally damaging, and has prompted urgent calls for legislation relating to a slew of ethical concerns.

Apocalyptic AI visions drawn from science fiction engage public interest. One fascinating scenario can be found in the 2018 movie Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac. The film is being released in the 4K Ultra HD home media format in the UK and US in October.

Annihilation features an “alien intelligence” – a popular analogy for AI among tech leaders – which embeds itself within Earth’s environment. Can such visions be useful to the current real-world doomsday debate?

Sci-fi could help reframe the real-world narrative in positive ways. There are strange techno-futurist and eugenicist visions at play within Silicon Valley, which appear popular with some tech billionaires.

These are linked to dark enlightenment thinking – a movement that rejects liberal democracy and egalitarianism – as well as effective altruism (attempting to impartially calculate benefits to provide the greatest good). These visions encompass long-term perspectives that accept present-day sacrifice for future wellbeing.

The future-oriented visions expressed by some tech leaders can be surreal, but they reflect the belief systems fuelling the drive for AI superintelligence. And that raises important questions, right now, about whose vision of the future we are investing in.

Alex Garland’s sci-fi horror film Annihilation takes us into these issues through one of the weirdest sci-fi visions that’s out there. It is loosely adapted from a novel by Jeff VanderMeer.

Termed the Shimmer, because it radiates energy, the AI steadily expands its reach (starting from Florida swampland) by operating as a networked entity beyond human control. It changes everything within its domain. People, animals, and plants mutate in unpredictable ways, seemingly infected by a strange parasite.

The story focuses on an expedition team, including genetics expert Lena (Portman), who enter the Shimmer seeking answers. They discover that all electromagnetic waves and DNA are being disrupted and reconfigured.

The Shimmer is interfering with the fundamental patterns of life, redefining evolutionary code. Among other things, the Shimmer learns to clone humans. This enables it to exist within human-type bodies anywhere on Earth.

Both extinction and immortality

Annihilation toys with different types of human extinction. Terminal extinction refers to humanity dying out while leaving a successor species, a bit like the concept of a human’s consciousness being uploaded onto a machine. Final extinction is when humanity ends, full stop.

When tech billionaires stumble over questions about wanting humanity to endure, they are probably thinking of terminal extinction. Surreal as it sounds, this magical thinking is a recurrent feature of the AI landscape.

Annihilation leaves the viewer to decide which form of human termination is occurring. The film draws on Garland’s deep fascination with AI. His debut as a director, Ex Machina, explored a humanoid robot passing the Turing test and breaking free from human control.

His television series Devs visualises a world where a quantum supercomputer has “godlike” capabilities.

Annihilation’s organic body horror uses imagery of destroyed, mutated, and cloned bodies to reflect profound social anxiety about humanity’s future. As Garland himself has suggested in an interview, there is a form of digital spirituality fuelling the tech billionaire drive for AI superintelligence and his sci-fi work explores this concept in various ways.

AI as parasite

Annihilation is weird but it makes sense through the parasite theory of communication. The French philosopher and historian of science Michel Serres expanded upon biological parasites to develop a media and communications theory. In it, he argued that all forms of interaction involve disruption and noise.

Whether intentional or not, within every interaction there is always some kind of human or non-human disruption at play. Think in terms of glitches and interference while using digital devices, background noise, changeable environments, uninvited guests and any other distraction. According to Serres’ idea, these can all be visualised as forms of parasite feeding on attempts to interact.

In some instances, the parasite takes over – the disruptor displaces the host. If the impact of a parasitical disruptor is significant, it can change society forever. Disruption is a popular term in technology, and AI can be seen as a global disruptor.

But disruption shouldn’t be viewed as inherently negative. In fact, disruption is generally considered a form of positive change because it offers new tools, systems and processes that displace the current methods and structures available to humans in everyday life.

But it raises the key issue of whose interests, ethics and beliefs are being propagated and served by the impact of AI as a disruptor. Annihilation visualises a parasitical disruptive force embedded within the environment, which invites comparison with the darker areas of techno-futuristic visions from Silicon Valley and beyond. Like the Shimmer, AI is not going away; it just keeps changing form.

More importantly, Annihilation shows how small-scale changes can build towards global impacts. The story to engage with isn’t the fantasy that AI superintelligence is about to dominate humanity – it’s the one about disruption and whether that is a net positive or negative for human society.

Changing how we think about and use AI requires critically examining it, disrupting the fantasy narrative, and redefining the discourse and direction of travel of this world-changing technology.

What Annihilation tells us is that becoming a disruptor can change our future visions and current realities in a positive way. It helps us see possibilities for a technological future that move beyond the human extinction trope.

Kevin Hunt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The 2026 Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to two researchers for their work on mirror-image molecules.

Frances’s Henri Kagan and Japan’s Kensō Soai were announced as this year’s winners during a news conference in Stockholm.

Some molecules, like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in living beings, exist in two forms that are each other’s mirror-image – like our left and right hands. Molecules that are mirror-image in this way are described as chiral, which is from the Greek word for hand.

Henri Kagan was born at Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1930. He is an emeritus professor at the Université Paris-Saclay. Kensō Soai was born at Hiroshima, Japan, in 1950. He is a lecturer at the Tokyo University of Science.

Kagan and Soai developed reactions to produce only one variant of a mirror-image molecule. Their work was decisive for chemists manufacturing medicines, where only one version of a drug molecule might have the desired effect in the body.

Mirror-image molecules are remarkably common and each form can have very different effects. For instance, one version of the substance limonene smells like orange, whereas the other variant of limonene smells like lemon.

Similarly, the molecule carvone exists in left and right hand variants. One form is responsible for the smell in caraway seeds and is used to stop potatoes spoiling, the mirror-image molecule smells like mint and is used to repel mosquitoes.

We can smell these different mirror-image molecules easily, because the receptors in our noses are built from amino acids that are all left handed.

A left hand doesn’t fit well into a right hand glove. Similarly, in biology, a left hand molecule fits differently than a right hand molecule into a receptor built from left hand amino acids.

When we consider chiral molecules, two questions arise: First, when we do a chemical reaction, we often make a mixture of the two mirror images – or enantiomers. This can be a problem when developing pharmaceuticals, for reasons we’ve already mentioned. How can we make exclusively a single mirror image?

Second, life is chiral because amino acids, exist naturally only in left handed forms. This has important knock on effects. But how did this left handed preference arise on Earth?

Finding solutions

Henri Kagan took a major step forward in 1986, when he found a new way to manipulate chemical reactions. Kagan started with a catalyst that was itself chiral. A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without being consumed in the process.

Kagan then showed how a mixture of the left and right hand versions of the catalyst could enhance the percentage of either the left or right hand form of the product.

In 2003, Soai addressed the second question: how can we start from no chirality and end up with solely the left or right hand variant of a chiral product?

To do this, he used a chemical reaction that is auto-catalytic – meaning that the product of the reaction is also the catalyst for the reaction.

Once the chiral product forms, it then catalyses the formation of only the left or right hand product. In this case, while initially both the left and right hand versions of the product will form, a tiny initial difference becomes self-reinforcing.

This allows one version of a molecule to take over. It can eventually comprise 99.99 per cent of the eventual product.

We don’t know the conditions on Earth four billion years ago that caused only left handed amino acids to form naturally. But Soai showed for the first time since the dawn of life that it is indeed possible to exclusively create one version of a mirror image molecule “from scratch”.

Matthew Addicoat receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust and ARIA. He has previously received funding from EPSRC and the Royal Society