A standard Russet Burbank potato has a mean density of one point zero eight grams per cubic centimetre. Phobos, the larger moon of Mars, has almost the exact same shape in every photograph taken since 1971. Because of this troubling overlap, the Japanese space agency will launch a five-year mission on Tuesday to retrieve a sample and test it for starch.
Our sample size for this mission is nineteen grams of surface dirt. The control group is a bag of baking potatoes purchased from a grocery store in Tsukuba. If the p-value is below zero point zero five, we must conclude that Mars is orbited by a root vegetable. A p-value is a number that tells you when it is time to panic.
The probe will also check for the origins of life in the solar system, which is a routine secondary task that should take about twenty minutes. Finding alien microbes would be mildly interesting for the interns. Finding a four-billion-year-old potato in the sky, however, would destroy every agricultural model we have.
"We have spent decades calling Phobos potato-shaped in our press releases without ever checking if we were being literal," said Dr. Kenji Sato, lead tuber investigator for the mission. "If we bring that sample back in 2031 and it turns brown when we leave it on the counter, physics is over."
