[HN Gopher] Images of the the samples returned to earth from the...
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Images of the the samples returned to earth from the asteroid Ryugu
Author : naetius
Score : 391 points
Date : 2020-12-28 13:01 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp)
| lucb1e wrote:
| Pardon my ignorance, but as I was typing a message in a chat
| group linking to this page and briefly mentioning why these rocks
| are special, I realized that we already have a ton of asteroid
| material on earth. I get that the outer layers will have burned
| in the atmosphere, but inside is still intact. Is this useful
| because we suspect the surface contains different materials? Or
| the crushing of it on impact? Or is there something else that
| makes this different from digging up one that came to us rather
| than us going to them?
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Contrary to random pieces falling onto earth they are from a
| specific astroid and not impacted by earth atmosphere (which
| burns those stones quite a bit)
|
| Thus they potentially reveal more details and allow comparison
| with planets and other objects, which might help to identify
| the origin of the astroid and in turn be a piece in the big
| story how our solar system came together.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| They shot a probe out into space, had it land on an asteroid,
| slam a slug into it to get below the surface, land on it again,
| and pick up rocks. In an era where the headliners are delivery
| and ride sharing apps, it's worth stepping back and considering
| this achievement for what it is.
|
| Maybe the rocks themselves aren't special, but where they came
| from and how we got them is a massive achievement.
| poma88 wrote:
| Nope. Not a massive achievement. Just a waste of money that
| could go to stop climate change.
| crubier wrote:
| That's an argument I can accept when talking about not
| spending trillions in wars and defense, but no when
| spending 1/10000th of that amount into the future of our
| species and something all our ancestors could only dream
| of: seeing alien worlds.
| t-writescode wrote:
| Today has been a day of hatred on Hacker News. First it was
| a person naysaying in the sex toy automation thread and now
| it's here.
|
| The sphere of knowledge and the sphere of usefulness expand
| in _all directions_.
|
| Sometimes usefulness expands in entertainment and pleasure
| (no one complains about Blizzard employees or Valve
| employees making games), sometimes they expand into cancer
| research, global warming research or, yes, in this case,
| space travel and extraterrestrial discovery.
|
| There are __billions __of people on this planet and
| billions of them have the potential to be scientists or
| engineers in some area of the multi-dimensional spheres of
| all human knowledge and use.
|
| If humanity must be seen as a hive mind, then it _still_
| can parallel process with, again, billions of people and
| hundreds of millions of scientists.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| I've noticed a decline in comment quality the last months
|
| Not sure if I'm correct though.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| How many? 4? 24? 42?
|
| I noticed a decline almost Internet-wide since around the
| 2014 UK elections. I wish an opinion calling space
| exploration a waste of money was the worst of it.
| t-writescode wrote:
| My operating theory is that isolation from the pandemic
| has made a lot of people on HN __incredibly __irritable
| in the last month or so.
|
| I see it at work. I see it on Reddit. I see it here on
| Hacker News. I'm taking some huge steps back from social
| media this week, myself, and also taking a week-long
| vacation.
|
| Edit: I've also seen it in myself.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a stepping stone to enable the future. There's no non-
| catastrophic future for humanity that doesn't involve
| expanding past Earth orbit.
|
| In fact, it may be entirely possible to eliminate the root
| cause behind climate change - _economic growth_ - in a
| humane way. So the best bet is to channel it in ways that
| aren 't destructive to Earth's biosphere. Asteroid mining
| is a part of that, and this achievement is a stepping stone
| in that direction.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| There are neither economical or technological hurdles that
| stop us from ending the release of greenhouse gases within
| a few years. It is only political will. Stopping climate
| change is too late since it is already happening and it
| won't be easy to get rid of the CO2 that we already
| released.
| warent wrote:
| IIRC a key thing that makes it special is that it's the first
| time an asteroid has ever been mined
| kingofpandora wrote:
| I'm sure the poster appreciates the achievement but the
| question remains whether these samples tell us something more
| than samples collected on earth.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Hayabusa 1 overcame massive hurdles and then sacrificed
| itself to deliver it's sample 10 years ago. It was very small
| - less than one gram - but first.
|
| Still nice to see such a big sample mass increase as well as
| managing to get it without harming the main probe, which can
| continue to do more science. :)
| johnny313 wrote:
| _Meteorite samples are far from perfect surrogates for
| asteroids, though. They experience extreme pressures and lose a
| great deal of their bulk when falling through Earth's
| atmosphere. Once they land, they pick up contaminants from the
| terrestrial environment that are hard to distinguish from
| native substances. Pristine samples from an asteroid might not
| only answer questions about the origins of life's chirality but
| also offer clues about how water ended up on Earth. One
| hypothesis suggests that asteroids, which contain some water,
| may have also seeded it onto our home planet during collisions
| (Science 2014, DOI: 10.1126 /science.1261952). _ [0]
|
| [0] https://cen.acs.org/physical-
| chemistry/astrochemistry/tale-2...
| anonAndOn wrote:
| Don't organic molecules break down when getting cooked in the
| atmosphere? Perhaps they'll find some chemistry that doesn't
| normally survive the fall to Earth.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Most of the advantage is in tech demonstration [1].
|
| Scientifically, retrieved samples are pristine and more
| massive, for a single body, than terrestrial samples. Retrieval
| also enables sampling non-NEOs.
|
| That said, I think your intuition is correct. The scientific
| value of these missions pales next to their technological
| value.
|
| [1] https://spacenews.com/op-ed-10-reasons-why-an-asteroid-
| redir...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Scientifically, retrieved samples are pristine and more
| massive, for a single body, than terrestrial samples._
|
| They also provide ground truth data. We know that the imaged
| samples 100% came from an asteroid, and a particular
| asteroid, whose characteristics we know from observation and
| other measurements. That's in contrast to terrestrial
| samples, for which we have to make educated guesses as to the
| properties of the bodies they came from. The former will be
| useful to cross-check and callibrate the latter.
| eb0la wrote:
| I believe there is also a good way to prove that some models
| work as we expect.
|
| I mean, we have now hard evidence that an given asteroid has
| properties X, Y, Z - and we have mathematical (or ML) models
| that infer such properties from indirect measures.
|
| At least, we have evidence to validate that models or spot
| errors on them with ground truth.
| yourMadness wrote:
| Asteroids on earth have been changed by the environment on
| earth. Part of it during entry, part of it during impact, part
| just lying there for long times.
|
| The Ryugu sample provides an opportunity to check our
| understanding of the changes that happened to asteroids on
| earth.
| flatiron wrote:
| Can't talk about moon rocks without thinking of this
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...
| djbebs wrote:
| I can already tell that those aluminum pieces are going to
| jumpstart their own conspiracies
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Better stock up on your tinfoil, peeps.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I think that was the aim, given how it was outlined and
| question marked in the last image without any grounded
| commentary. Drama = Views
| ianai wrote:
| It's most likely from the probe itself. Some part that got
| smooshed in the extraction process.
| xmaaayyy wrote:
| They said in the last image description that it was likely
| from the spacecraft itself though. Saying "it's under
| investigation " just means they wanted to get the images out
| ASAP before they had the team investigate the origin.
| someperson wrote:
| The last image clearly states: "The origin is under
| investigation, but a probable source is aluminium scraped
| off the spacecraft sampler horn as the projectile was fired
| to stir up material during touchdown."
| dusted wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing "probably scraped it off of
| itself" xD
|
| Mostly, because this is 2020, and finding any indication
| of extraterrestrial life is out of the question in this
| burning trash-heap of a year :)
| ringshall wrote:
| You (and seemingly everyone else compiling news-from-2020
| lists) forget about the discovery of signs of life in the
| atmosphere of Venus. Not to be grandiose, but, if true,
| in 500 years this will likely be the only thing generally
| remembered about 2020.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02785-5
| phkahler wrote:
| >> signs of life in the atmosphere of Venus.
|
| Haha! What's more likely, that a compound is produced in
| a way we dont understand or that some new life form
| exists in a way we don't understand?
|
| If there were ever a time to apply occams razor that's
| it.
| ringshall wrote:
| Forget I said this. Clearly it's impossible and the
| cranks at mit and nature should not have announced their
| findings.
| 1_player wrote:
| Is there any update to this?
| wingspar wrote:
| "Potential signs of life on Venus are fading fast
|
| ...But those results have since come under scrutiny,
| including from the original discovery team, which, citing
| a calibration error in one telescope it used, has
| downgraded the strength of its claim. Although the
| proponents remain confident of a phosphine detection,
| other astronomers have suggested that sulfur dioxide,
| which makes up most clouds on Venus, could have caused a
| similar absorption, among other critiques. ..."
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1021
| [deleted]
| decasteve wrote:
| Looks like a glob of solder to me.
| snickms wrote:
| In case you missed it - the Coldworm species launched their own
| probe and it crashed on the surface back in April. This is
| clearly debris from that crash, so no conspiracy here. Having
| said that, I do think those guys on Europa are really getting
| their sh*t together these days. If it wasn't for a spurious
| emission from some random Starlink earthsat, they probably
| would have made it.
|
| ..well that and their silly 137-base maths,
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> ..well that and their silly 137-base maths,
|
| Easy for you to diss another species when you have
| conveniently 10-fingered prehensile limb appendages.
| snickms wrote:
| Let me guess - you're a Coldy, right? Yes it is easier for
| us, but some of the stuff you do is insane despite your
| 'disadvantages' IMHO. Who thought it was a good idea to
| have a character set that changes every orbit? Yes it is
| nice to know when a document was created, but "Hey, we
| could use a timestamp" really should have entered the
| neuromesh at some point.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| We need to get the VXers on this ASAP.
| TickleSteve wrote:
| Coke can,,,
| madengr wrote:
| Who said they are aluminum? Could be element 151.
| generalizations wrote:
| Seems like it would have been possible to use an unusual alloy
| for any pieces of the craft likely to be mixed in with the
| samples - some strange alloy variation, or an unusual degree of
| radiation - just to 'tag' the materials and prevent this kind
| of mixup from happening.
| amai wrote:
| This is the start of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining . In a surprise
| move Elon Musk will soon scrap his plans for Mars an become even
| richer by mining rare earth materials from asteroids ;-)
| L33tCrown wrote:
| That will be more helpful
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Things you find everywhere you look: scraps of aluminum foil.
| Styrofoam pellets. Dog hair.
| Igelau wrote:
| And glitter. I have a cosmological theory that glitter is the
| final end state of the universe. I call it the Big Bling.
| robocat wrote:
| Glitter is the herpes of art materials.
| rozab wrote:
| It's all that missing matter.
| desktopninja wrote:
| I am going with a Space Man's discarded sandwich foil wrap
| ended up on asteroid and we captured a piece of it!
|
| Does this mean Lobo is real?! Oooooh man
| someperson wrote:
| Checkout this great photo of a small piece of plastic on the
| surface of Mars taken with the Curiosity rover:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/11or5h/the_thingplas...
|
| Here's the official NASA source:
| https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/4806/small-debris-on-the-gro...
|
| Incredible that humans have already started littering on Mars
| without even setting foot on the planet.
| z3t4 wrote:
| I guess it's not _that_ difficult to get something to crash
| into Mars. So it might be debris from non-official missions.
| jcims wrote:
| It's interesting how the curation of this material makes it worth
| $250M vs. any kind of rarity or value of the constituent
| compounds.
| moron4hire wrote:
| No, it isn't the "curation process". As always, the labor
| theory of value is complete bunk. The same process used to
| collect samples on Earth will not create the same value in the
| samples.
|
| The value of the samples is the willingness of someone to pay
| for them. A particular group of scientists want to see what
| unexpected components and features are in the sample. Send the
| same sample to a group of vehicle engineers or surgeons or
| athletes and they won't be willing to pay that price.
| beervirus wrote:
| > Send the same sample to a group of vehicle engineers or
| surgeons or athletes and they won't be willing to pay that
| price.
|
| But this is true of everything. Value is decided by
| participants in the relevant market, not by some random
| people who aren't part of that market and who don't know what
| they're looking at. The market for gold values it at around
| $1900/ounce, but if you took an ounce of gold to some
| uncontacted indigenous tribe, you would not get market value
| for it.
| moron4hire wrote:
| Yes, it is true of everything, and it debunks the labor
| theory of value.
|
| Curation, being a labor process, does not add value to
| anything.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| If curation did not add value, the market would not
| demand it, and soon enough the curators would realize
| their business is not profitable and stop doing it.
| Curation happening consistently and over a long period of
| time is a sign that it does add value.
| jcims wrote:
| Your reconstruction of intent from my words is putting
| you in a very different place from where I am.
|
| Curation - I provided the definition above because you
| seem to be focused on the collection part of curation.
| There is more to it than that. You cannot 'curate' these
| samples on Earth because they don't exist on earth.
|
| Value - I'm using this term in the sense of 'what would
| someone pay for these'? I'm using it much the same way
| that art is valued or classic cars are valued for
| auction, not the internal mysteries of motivation or the
| commoditized value of a good like cold rolled steel or
| corn. In this case, like art, the provenance,
| authenticity and care of the instance is generally
| considered essential and therefore why the 'curation'
| does actually have a meaningful role in the value (at
| least by virtue of not destroying it along the way).
| beervirus wrote:
| There are plenty of reasons that the labor theory of
| value is wrong. The fact that different people value
| things differently isn't really one of them.
| jcims wrote:
| _cu*ra*tion /ky@'raSH@n/ noun
|
| the action or process of selecting, organizing, and looking
| after the items in a collection or exhibition._
|
| I don't understand what you're getting at. The universe
| doesn't appear to assign any intrinsic value to anything, it
| is only there by virtue of someone that's willing to pay. So
| yes, the fact that someone found this collection of minerals
| from a specific source worth the price of collecting it is
| why we have these photos.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| >No, it isn't the "curation process". As always, the labor
| theory of value is complete bunk. The same process used to
| collect samples on Earth will not create the same value in
| the samples.
|
| This has nothing to do with the labour theory of value (since
| asteroid material is very much a one-off item, and certainly
| not a reproducible commodity sold in a capitalist market),
| but even if it did, you're misunderstanding it. The theory
| does not state that any item with human labour taken to
| produce it gives it a price corresponding to that value.
| Instead, the theory states that this is the case if and only
| if the good is also a bearer of a use-value - i.e. it is of
| some use to the market.
| jcims wrote:
| I wasn't familiar with the labor theory of value and tried
| to get up to speed briefly to understand the argument. Your
| distillation of it is _waaay_ clearer than the rambling
| treatments I was finding. Thank you!
| wil421 wrote:
| These specific compounds have provenance that make them very
| valuable. Asteroid pieces that havent been through the
| atmosphere are pretty scarce. Provenance and scarcity make them
| worth $250m.
| jcims wrote:
| I apparently need to stop using the term 'its interesting'
| haha. You said what I meant.
| extropy wrote:
| It's the information it contains about the composition of
| billions of tons of similar material that is still back there.
|
| And then some of that price goes towards technology
| advancements for future missions.
| koreanguy wrote:
| how does powder turn into rocks ? the very first photos released
| showed nothing of miniature rocks.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Sometime in the future, we will be mining millions of tons of
| these! Start of something beautiful.
| idkwhoiam wrote:
| Excuse my ignorance but a funny thought popped up in my head.
| If we start bringing material from asteroids the total mass of
| Earth will increase over time. How much material can we bring
| on Earth safely without affecting the Moon and our planet's
| course around the Sun?
|
| I feel this question belongs to /r/theydidthemath/
| spenczar5 wrote:
| The mass of the earth is irrelevant for its orbit around the
| sun, so there's no effect there. That's why comets,
| asteroids, motes of dust, and planet can all maintain orbits
| (see https://faculty.virginia.edu/skrutskie/ASTR1210/notes/or
| beq...., for example).
|
| It matters for the moon in theory, but not in practice. The
| moon needs to move at 1,001m/s to stay in orbit (formula: htt
| ps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+sqrt%28G+*%28mass+of+...)
| . If we added the mass of _the entire asteroid belt_ to the
| earth 's mass... it would still be the same within a rounding
| error; the orbital velocity changes by a tiny amount (https:/
| /www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+sqrt%28%28gravitation...).
| [deleted]
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Meteorites fall on Earth all the time so I wouldn't be
| worried about that. Also we've removed lots of mass from
| Earth with all the stuff we've put up in space.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Daily we receive about 72000 kg.
| csunbird wrote:
| We also probably lose somewhere near that from atmosphere.
| pp19dd wrote:
| For what it's worth, estimated combined mass of all currently
| cataloged asteroids in our system (currently just over 1
| million) is less than our moon's.
|
| Doubling mass of our moon wouldn't change the orbit:
| https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-would-happen-to-the-
| orbit-o...
|
| Edit: just found my notes. Awhile back I tried to reason out
| how fast we'd get in orbital trouble if we started ejecting
| all of our garbage into the sun, just an academic exercise.
| Rough estimate by an established astronomer [1] was that
| we're safe in the 0.95 AU - 1.69 AU range, so our orbit could
| vary from -7.25 mil km to +54.7 mil. km and we'd stay within
| the habitable zone. After that I plugged known values into an
| orbital simulator [2] and eyeballed how much mass loss that'd
| have to be and how long it would take.
| 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 (kg) mass of the earth
| 597,360,000,000,000,000,000 (kg) we're in slight trouble at
| 0.0001 loss 50,000,000 (kg)
| per year normal loss to space
| 126,642,989,704 (kg) garbage landfilled per year
| 242,944,073,372 (kg) handled total per year World
| est: 2,010,000,000,000 (kg) per year (300 mil years!)
|
| Another astronomer on mass: "If the force of gravity was
| halved, [Earth's] speed would be exactly the escape speed. In
| fact, any body orbiting in a circular orbit would become
| unbound if the force of gravity was reduced by a factor of
| two"
|
| [1] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/39-our-
| sol...
|
| [2] http://orbitsimulator.com/gsim.html
| poma88 wrote:
| Why they call it astrobiology? Would be perhaps more correct
| "biochemistry".
| chestervonwinch wrote:
| There are two "the"s in the HN title.
| et-iphone-home wrote:
| I thought it said, "images of Earth from the asteroid Ryugu".
| Disappointed, that's something this earthing would surely like to
| see.
| cletus wrote:
| One thing I'll be interested to see if there are any heavy
| elements in the samples.
|
| Why? Because anything from the Uranium decay chain effectively
| dates the creation of those elements.
|
| I belong to the school of thought that believes that spacefaring
| life is relatively rare. By "rare" I mean we may well be the only
| one within the Milky Way (within our light cone). There are lots
| of reasons for this but a lot of people have put a lot of thought
| into this but it's a whole separate topic.
|
| Anyway, this then raises the issue of the Fermi Paradox. One
| angle might be the relative abundance of elements heavier than
| iron.
|
| Elements up to iron are relatively common in the Universe because
| they're created by nuclear fusion. More specifically, nuclear
| fusion of elements up to iron produces energy.
|
| Heavier elements are produced by supernovae or the merger of
| neutron stars and/or black holes (as we've detected by LIGO in
| recent years). It seems like a neutron star merger is almost
| required for the relative abundance of such elements we have on
| Earth. That might be one reason why spacefaring life is "rare".
|
| I've seen some discussion of this for Earth-bound materials
| suggesting they were created 80-200 million years (IIRC) before
| the Earth was.
|
| So I'm curious how old samples like these. Are they from the same
| event or do they have a different origin? Examining such samples
| from other parts of the Solar System may tell us about the
| relative likelihood of such events on cosmic timelines.
| rmu09 wrote:
| I wonder, if something "large" (like a neutron star merger)
| happened "just" before earth was formed, where is that large
| object now? It doesn't seem to be in our immediate
| neighborhood.
| humazed wrote:
| The sun should be what's left of the supernova explosion that
| created the solar system.
| cubano wrote:
| So wouldn't the obvious thing be that this asteroids composition
| would be almost identical to the earth's since, of course, our
| planet was formed by billions of these things crashing into it?
|
| Now maybe that makes them incredibly valuable, and of course I am
| sure there must be some statistical distribution of asteroids
| with valuable minerals and those without hardly any, but I feel
| there is currently this idea that all asteroids are a hugely
| valuable to be mined no matter.
|
| Is this true?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Probably, but since Earth was molten lava for a long time, all
| the heavy materials are at the center, while the surface we
| stumble around on is the lightest materials.
|
| What little surface metal we have come from volcanoes and late
| era asteroids, as I understand it.
|
| This is why a single metal asteroid could revolutionize Earth's
| economy, even though we have billions times more of the same
| material under our feet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The Earth is highly differentiated. What's at the surface is
| not representative of its average composition, or of the
| average composition of the material it was formed from.
|
| In particular, the Earth's surface is highly depleted in
| platinum group elements compared to carbonaceous chondrites.
| That's because those elements strongly segregated into the
| molten metal that flowed into the Earth's core when the planet
| was very hot. Ditto for gold. The Earth's surface is also
| depleted in tellurium; this is thought to be due to the
| volatility of TeH2. On the other hand, the earth's continental
| crust has three orders of magnitude higher concentration of
| uranium than the chondritic average; the Earth is likely the
| best place in the solar system to mine that element.
| Jweb_Guru wrote:
| Well, just to address the value of asteroids question--the
| Earth itself has many incredibly valuable minerals and metals;
| however, most of that material is extremely far below the
| surface, rendering it virtually inaccessible. In contrast, this
| material is readily accessible on smaller asteroids. While I
| personally doubt that the cost of transporting the material
| anywhere near Earth will make asteroid mining worth it in
| comparison to better exploiting the material already on Earth,
| that's the basic logic here.
| ianai wrote:
| It will make sense to mine them for construction projects in
| space before dropping them to earth. But given the size and
| composition of some of these objects, mining asteroids could
| eventually answer a lot of resource scarcity.
| milchek wrote:
| Exactly, there are always comments about how it's not worth
| it right now, but that is now, who knows what the future
| will bring. We maybe be mining, refining, and doing all our
| manufacturing in space.
|
| All our industrial waste could just be jettisoned into the
| endless vacuum of space and the earth might just be for
| residential and commercial use.
|
| Maybe I'm being fanciful, naive, or just dreaming too much,
| but it's nice to imagine that kind of future where the
| earth is just a sanctuary to live and space is where the
| factories and the rubbish goes.
| [deleted]
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm always curious how heat dissipation is supposed to
| work in these space projects. The vacuum of space is a
| hell of a good insulator as far as I know, no?
| PeterisP wrote:
| You don't get heat conduction and convection in space,
| but thermal radiation works.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| At the rate of about 100--350 W/m2. More energy -> more
| radiators. At about 12 kg/m^2 launch budget * $10k/kg
| LEO.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_thermal_control#
| Rad...
|
| The ISS has 156 m2 of radiators, compared with 3,246 m2
| of solar PV arrays.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >More energy -> more radiators.
|
| Which you can make out of the asteroids you're mining for
| the cost of shipping up the production facilities. It's a
| bootstrap cost problem rather than a fundamental
| efficiencies problem.
|
| >$10k/kg LEO.
|
| $2.5k last I heard with the Falcon 9 and SpaceX is aiming
| to go much lower.
|
| edit: And by much lower Musk means $10/kg to lunar orbit
| (that's dollars not thousands of dollars). Even if he's
| off by an order or two of magnitude it's still a lot
| cheaper.
| whitexn--g28h wrote:
| You dump heat into chunks of asteroid and throw them
| away, once you have disposable mass available dissipating
| heat is fairly simple.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I don't think anyone (credible) is claiming that all asteroids
| are valuable. There are however many asteroids that would be
| valuable (or so we suspect). When earth formed heavy stuff sunk
| to the bottom and light stone rose to the top, and as a
| consequence e.g. most metal is in Earth's core, out of reach.
| On some asteroids valuable material is much more plentiful than
| in the parts of earth we can reach
| pfdietz wrote:
| A heavy _phase_ went to the Earth 's core, but there's plenty
| of metal up here, and some metals (like, uranium) are
| strongly concentrated in the crust, because chemically they
| segregated into light silicate phases.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What's in the samples? What kind of materials?
| acvny wrote:
| Looks like coal to me :)
| ImaCake wrote:
| Maybe not too wrong a guess either. Brief reading suggests
| that carbon and silicon are pretty common in this kind of
| asteroid and carbon sure does like forming compounds that are
| black in the visible spectrum.
| dvh wrote:
| Carbonaceous chondrites
| acvny wrote:
| These are groups of meteorites, not materials
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance of what sensors are on that platform. Are
| they doing spectroscopy? Can they just subtract the aluminum
| signature out of the data if they have extra of the exact batch
| they used for comparison?
| loopback_device wrote:
| This is about samples returned to Earth, analysis is not
| constrained by instruments on a spacecraft
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Oh this is the one that's returning samples to earth. Doy.
|
| Thanks.
| mlindner wrote:
| This is one of actually several ongoing sample return
| missions actually.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| There is an interesting near-future thriller about mining Ryugu -
| "Delta-V" by Daniel Suarez, the same author of "Daemon".
| zolosa wrote:
| It looks way more than few milligrams.
| detritus wrote:
| Thanks for posting this - I had been under the impression the
| maximum load was expected to be less than a gram - some of the
| singular 'grains' in Chamber C look like I'd expect them to
| weigh more than gram individually.
|
| Perhaps given they are the from a small gravitational mass,
| they are much less dense than we'd intuitively expect?
| taylorwc wrote:
| Semi-related, the Hayabusa 2 has an incredibly cool real time
| dashboard that's publicly accessible [0].
|
| [0] http://haya2now.jp/en.html
| est31 wrote:
| Pretty cool! Why is it showing data that's 4 days old?
| mlindner wrote:
| Maybe it's not actually automated? Or maybe during the
| holiday here they're not pointing the antennas at the
| spacecraft, especially as it's after the mission has
| finished?
| varjag wrote:
| Worth mentioning here that its mission has been extended to
| 2031 to include rendezvous with two other asteroids.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Forgive my ignorance, but how were the samples sent back
| to earth if the satellite is still in space? Did it
| rendevous with a ship or another satellite?
| flagrant wrote:
| The sample container separates from the spacecraft during
| the Earth encounter. The spacecraft performs a manoeuvre
| to return to an escape trajectory while the container
| falls to Earth. There's a graphic showing the re-entry
| procedure at http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp - the 'TCM'
| points are where adjustments are made to trajectory, the
| final one sending the spacecraft back into space.
| flerchin wrote:
| These images are remarkably low resolution. Like someone used a
| handheld digital camera from 2002.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| This is advanced web design by Japanese standards. Image
| magnification with CSS hover is mind blowing.
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