Japan’s space agency to capture ultra-detailed images of Martian moons

Last week, we published a story coming out of Chile where scientists are building a camera so powerful it can spot a golf ball 15 miles away. The camera can snap 3,200-megapixel images and is meant to help us unlock some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. In related news out of Japan, the country’s space agency JAXA announced that it’s planning to photograph Mars’ mysterious moons with cameras that can shoot 8K ultra-high-definition images. To pull this feat off, JAXA is teaming up with the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK). For both parties, the goal is to uncover some of the origin stories behind Mars’s two relatively tiny moons, Deimos and Phobos. They’re highly unusual as they orbit the Red Planet at extremely close distances. Deimos’ orbit takes it as close as 3,700 miles away from the Martian surface — about one percent of the distance between the Earth and its Moon. The idea is that the camera will snap ultra-HD images and broadcast them to the world. If successful, it would mark the first time Mars and its mysterious moons are captured in such fine detail.

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