why this scary
This is cool and all, and I am super stoked we can do this…but my brain keeps saying, yeah, so what, it’s a big rock.
Here’s an article about this rock
Not even surprised that a hayabusa would be fast enough to make it to an asteroid.
Wait til you find out where the “haya” comes from 😜
Wow, this is even more amazing than I first thought
Hayabusa2 was launched on 3 December 2014 and rendezvoused in space with near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu on 27 June 2018.[11] It surveyed the asteroid for a year and a half and took samples. It left the asteroid in November 2019 and returned the samples to Earth on 5 December 2020 UTC.
I’m not sure why but this fills me with such inconsolable dread. Something about a dead cold rock floating through such vast nothingness.
No, no, no. It actually isn’t lifeless. It contains some small microbes that are virtually undetectable. Their only effect on the human psyche is to create paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and remove all traces of empathy.
It kind of reminds me of the comet from Outer Wilds, which was kinda spooky, in terms of having to land on this tiny object traveling very fast through space and navigate it
This image is ripe for an SCP to be written up based on it.
Imagine being one of the first humans to try to mine one of these, and you feel like you saw something moving in the corner of your eye, just where the light meets the shadow of one of the sharp lumps, but you can’t be sure.
Thanks, I hate it. No chance of any sleep tonight.
😄
You’re welcome friend <3
Yeah, and knowing the only reason you can see it is because of the lighting from the robot taking the photo. Otherwise it’s just this thing shrouded in darkness flying through space at whatever ridiculously fast speed only to eventually run into something.
You get it. Scary ain’t it.
Picture from the lander is neat too
https://www.space.com/asteroid-ryugu-survived-major-catastrophe.html
Scientists: Yes, we finally did it! We captured a picture from our probe that touched down on a big rock in space! We are awesome!
Me: Holy shit! That is so cool, you are awesome! What did the rock look like?
Scientists: Like a big fucking rock
Me: Dude, no way!
Don’t forget the endless abyss that was pictured too.
endless abyss with distant pockets of potential wonder!
(Lovecraft vs Star Trek)
Yeah but we can see the endless abyss by looking up any time there isn’t too much light around
With pictures like this it’s so hard to convince my brain that it’s not just a picture of a random boulder taken with flash at night.
I worked on Landsat 9 a few years ago, and when I got on-console for my first shift after it launched, I remembered seeing the telemetry come down and thinking, huh, doesn’t look any different than when we simulated the data…how do I know we actually sent it up there?
Then something went wrong that i had to fix and I snapped back to reality.
I mean, you’re not wrong.
Except this specific boulder isn’t stuck in earth’s gravity well, it’s got its own thing going on.
I was looking at pictures of Mars’ surface from Curiosity with my uncle who is a lunar landing and science denier. He said, “That could be taken at any desert on Earth.” I was like NO SHIT! You mean to tell me that other planets have rocks too?!?! No fucking way! What do you expect it to look like?
You and your 6th grade reading level somehow outsmarted two generations of NASA scientists and their massive coverup and lies about space exploration? No, you fucking dunce.
My friend is a flat earther
I feel your pain
I hope he’s not watching David Weiss’ content. He keeps showing an image that was taken on earth, modified to look like Mars, and then claims it’s directly from NASA’s website.
Whenever he’s asked for the direct source he says he’ll send it over, but never does.
Tell him if they faked it. Russia would not waste a moment to point that out.
They congratulated us. If we faked it, Russia would have faked it first.
When you think about it, that’s kinda exactly what it is. Which is very cool :-D
Just a big random boulder in space amongst a whole solar system of random boulders, taken with a light for illumination because it’s dark, yo
It definitely reminds me of a cave.
There are barely visible tiny features that would have eroded away on Earth.
That said, they are barely visible and tiny. If somebody said it’s just some weird concretion, I’d completely believe it.
Except no weathering.
There is lots of weathering on mars
But not on an asteroid
They literally shot it with a 2kg copper slug (bullet) to expose parts that were not weathered to collect samples
There’s absolutely no sense of scale here.
What we see as rocks, could absolutely be boulders…
We’d tend to error of the side of ‘small’ but with no fluid (liquid or air) erosion, these could be massive.
Looks like an old attic with dirty insulation
Alright, this gives me crazy heebie jeebies. Something about how close that horizon is, combined with the fact that beyond it is just nothing, absolute nothing, for light-years in most directions; hits the buttons for claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia, and thalassophobia at the same time.
I have never felt happy about the fact that I was born too early to go space mining til now. No thanks. Maybe if I get to keep a ton or two of native platinum for myself, otherwise no thanks.
Now also imagine the view when you’re there and you turn off the light.
Black will be really fucking black and you will only see some stars
I’m just thinking about all the technical challenges to land a flying metal cereal box on a moving asteroid…
Man, this rocks.
What’s the scale?
The asteroid is about 1 km thick, it seems
Someone forgot to bring banana
Pffft, thats just attic insulation, obv.
My take on it is that it’s a lot of fluffy stuff just collected together and eventually mashed down under its own worth, so you aren’t far off
Looks like the insulation in my attic.
It super does look like that!
That is definitely a pile of dirt. Sweet.
