JAXA is about to perform a Phobos sample return mission

Nice. These missions that tell us the basics about objects in the Solar System are more useful than, say, re-visiting the moon or Mars.

Venus and Europa could use some attention. Anything underway?

Bringing Protomolecule to earth, when?

(Minor spoilers for The Expanse, word Protomolecule means something there.)

JAXA does great work, they also publish the highest resolution open access global surface elevation model. Really impressive for a country with about 1/10th the GDP of the US.

I hope they make some photos of Phobos monolith: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobos_monolith

This is good space science.

Unlike iPhone selfies around the moon, or golf on mars.

Manned space missions are very rarely justified in the modern era.

An unmanned probe doing science for 20 years, or a one shot influenza photo op.

The cost is about the same...

I wonder how this mission compares in scale to the JAXA Hayabusa comet interceptor done twenty years ago.