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Images of the the samples returned to earth from the asteroid Ryugu
- djbebs 6y agoI can already tell that those aluminum pieces are going to jumpstart their own conspiracies
- tetris11 6y agoI think that was the aim, given how it was outlined and question marked in the last image without any grounded commentary. Drama = Views
- ianai 6y agoIt’s most likely from the probe itself. Some part that got smooshed in the extraction process.
- xmaaayyy 6y agoThey 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 6y agoThe 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoYou (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 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02785-5
- 1_player 6y agoIs there any update to this?
- wingspar 6y ago"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 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6520/1021
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 6y ago>> 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 6y agoForget I said this. Clearly it’s impossible and the cranks at mit and nature should not have announced their findings.
- 6y ago
- madengr 6y agoWho said they are aluminum? Could be element 151.
- decasteve 6y agoLooks like a glob of solder to me.
- snickms 6y agoIn 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,
- jeffrallen 6y agoWe need to get the VXers on this ASAP.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago>> ..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 6y agoLet 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.
- generalizations 6y agoSeems 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.
- kordlessagain 6y agoBetter stock up on your tinfoil, peeps.
- TickleSteve 6y agoCoke can,,,
- flatiron 6y agoCan’t talk about moon rocks without thinking of this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks#Theft_of_NASA_rocks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThings you find everywhere you look: scraps of aluminum foil. Styrofoam pellets. Dog hair.
- someperson 6y agoCheckout 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_thingplastic_curiosity_found_on_mars_in_3d/ 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-ground-beside-curiosity/?site=msl 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.
- Igelau 6y agoAnd glitter. I have a cosmological theory that glitter is the final end state of the universe. I call it the Big Bling.
- robocat 6y agoGlitter is the herpes of art materials.
- rozab 6y agoIt's all that missing matter.
- jcims 6y agoIt's interesting how the curation of this material makes it worth $250M vs. any kind of rarity or value of the constituent compounds.
- moron4hire 6y agoNo, 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.
- jcims 6y agocu·ra·tion /kyəˈrāSHən/ 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.
- beervirus 6y ago> 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 6y agoYes, it is true of everything, and it debunks the labor theory of value. Curation, being a labor process, does not add value to anything.
- Waterluvian 6y agoForgive 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 6y agoThis is about samples returned to Earth, analysis is not constrained by instruments on a spacecraft
- Waterluvian 6y agoOh this is the one that's returning samples to earth. Doy. Thanks.
- mlindner 6y agoThis is one of actually several ongoing sample return missions actually.
- koreanguy 6y agohow does powder turn into rocks ? the very first photos released showed nothing of miniature rocks.
- drak0n1c 6y agoThere is an interesting near-future thriller about mining Ryugu - “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez, the same author of “Daemon”.
- aero-glide2 6y agoSometime in the future, we will be mining millions of tons of these! Start of something beautiful.
- idkwhoiam 6y agoExcuse 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/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hiccuphippo 6y agoMeteorites 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 6y agoDaily we receive about 72000 kg.
- csunbird 6y agoWe also probably lose somewhere near that from atmosphere.
- spenczar5 6y agoThe 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/orbeq.html https://faculty.virginia.edu/skrutskie/ASTR1210/notes/orbeq...., 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: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+sqrt%28G+*%28mass+of+the+earth%29%2F+distance+to+the+moon%29+ https://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%28gravitational+constant%29+*%28%28mass+of+the+earth%29+%2B+total+mass+of+asteroid+belt%29%2F+distance+to+the+moon%29+ https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=+sqrt%28%28gravitation...).
- cubano 6y agoSo 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?
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoWell, 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 6y agoIt 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 6y agoExactly, 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.
- zolosa 6y agoIt looks way more than few milligrams.
- detritus 6y agoThanks 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?
- cletus 6y agoOne 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 6y agoI 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 6y agoThe sun should be what's left of the supernova explosion that created the solar system.
- kbelder 6y agoWe do a full orbit around the galactic core about once every 250 million years... so our solar system has made about 20-30 orbits. It's very likely that our stellar neighborhood has completely changed since the Earth formed.
- taylorwc 6y agoSemi-related, the Hayabusa 2 has an incredibly cool real time dashboard that's publicly accessible [0]. [0] http://haya2now.jp/en.html http://haya2now.jp/en.html
- est31 6y agoPretty cool! Why is it showing data that's 4 days old?
- mlindner 6y agoMaybe 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 6y agoWorth mentioning here that its mission has been extended to 2031 to include rendezvous with two other asteroids.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoForgive 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 6y agoThe 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 http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp - the 'TCM' points are where adjustments are made to trajectory, the final one sending the spacecraft back into space.
- 6y ago
- lucb1e 6y agoPardon 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?
- yourMadness 6y agoAsteroids 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.
- warent 6y agoIIRC a key thing that makes it special is that it's the first time an asteroid has ever been mined
- kingofpandora 6y agoI'm sure the poster appreciates the achievement but the question remains whether these samples tell us something more than samples collected on earth.
- m4rtink 6y agoHayabusa 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. :)
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoMost 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-redirect-mission-is-worth-doing/ https://spacenews.com/op-ed-10-reasons-why-an-asteroid-redir...
- flerchin 6y agoThese images are remarkably low resolution. Like someone used a handheld digital camera from 2002.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoThis is advanced web design by Japanese standards. Image magnification with CSS hover is mind blowing.
- et-iphone-home 6y agoI thought it said, "images of Earth from the asteroid Ryugu". Disappointed, that's something this earthing would surely like to see.
- ilaksh 6y agoWhat's in the samples? What kind of materials?
- dvh 6y agoCarbonaceous chondrites
- acvny 6y agoThese are groups of meteorites, not materials
- acvny 6y agoLooks like coal to me :)
- ImaCake 6y agoMaybe 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.
- amai 6y agoThis is the start of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining 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 6y agoThat will be more helpful
- poma88 6y agoWhy they call it astrobiology? Would be perhaps more correct "biochemistry".
- chestervonwinch 6y agoThere are two "the"s in the HN title.
- tcgv 6y agoNice catch! As to why most readers didn't notice it (myself included): https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13946/why-does-the-brain-skip-over-repeated-the-words-in-sentences https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13946/why-doe...
- blackrock 6y agoOn a side note, what are the odds that there is a giant gold asteroid, floating around out there in the asteroid belt? After all, a huge nickel asteroid slammed into what is now Canada, and left a huge nickel deposit there, just waiting to be mined out one day. The same idea can be said for something like gold or platinum.
- academi 6y ago> Artificial material seems to be present in chamber C What good is this if they’re guessing at it being a contaminant they introduced? At least say it’s possible that it isn’t. Maybe it really had metal fragments on it.
- op00to 6y agoBecause it is most likely a piece of the spacecraft that got broken off during the collection attempt.
- icebadger 6y agoThis is the rest of the paragraph: > Artificial material seems to be present in chamber C. 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.
- robga 6y agoBest unboxing ever.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ineedasername 6y agoUnfortunately it showed signs of being the perfect substance to use for a galactic highway, perhaps having fallen off a transport of such material. #bring_a_towel