MG-J27
The first flight designed around what the baseline returns.
Connection, not extension.
Nexus is the first Martian Grow mission whose science design comes from MG data, not borrowed protocols. Horizon and Catalyst establish the baseline; their returns tell us which exposure variables matter, which sample formats survive, which measurement layers carry signal.
Nexus is what we do with that answer. The mission spec is being built around the questions the baseline year asks back.
Baseline on one side. Applied breeding on the other.
Every prior flight assumed the orbital environment was the variable. Nexus is the first flight where the program already knows which variable mattered, and designs the payload to push on that one specifically.
It is also the first flight where the breeding decisions on the ground feed back into the mission spec. The lines that show inheritable changes after Horizon recovery become the lines we send up on Nexus. Information flows in both directions.
Most of it.
Nexus is intentionally late-binding. Locking the spec before the baseline data returns would defeat the point of the mission. The program publishes a confirmed manifest after Horizon's first dataset locks — expected mid-2027.