Images of the the samples returned to earth from the asteroid Ryugu
hayabusa2.jaxa.jp
hayabusa2.jaxa.jp
This is where SCVs started.
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 :)
...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. ..."
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.
"By late October 2020, the review of data processing of the data collected by both ALMA used in original publication of September 2020, and later JCMT data, has revealed background interpolation errors resulting in multiple spurious lines, including the spectral feature of phosphine. Re-analysis of data with a proper subtraction of background either does not result in the detection of the phosphine or detects it with concentration of 1ppb, 20 times below original estimate."
..well that and their silly 137-base maths,
Easy for you to diss another species when you have conveniently 10-fingered prehensile limb appendages.
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. :)
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...
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.
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.
And when you get both A and B, the relative value of A vs B may be as claimed, but what really matters in the cost/benefit analysis is the value of A+B.
And even the value of the science is an interesting question, because science that finds what we "already know" has some value, but not much, but science that finds what we never expected changes history. And in our estimates of scientific value, we never expect to find what we never expected.
The Ryugu sample provides an opportunity to check our understanding of the changes that happened to asteroids on earth.
[0] https://cen.acs.org/physical-chemistry/astrochemistry/tale-2...
Maybe the rocks themselves aren't special, but where they came from and how we got them is a massive achievement.
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.
> You might therefore wonder if we should instead analyse meteorites. However, meteorites consist of the material that is left over after re-entry through the atmosphere and their structure, along with easily volatile substances, have been lost. They will also be contaminated with substances from the Earth. On the other hand, samples from the asteroids are brought back to Earth in the same condition as they were in space, with the “re-entry capsule” protecting the sample through the atmosphere and landing.
The quantity isn't as high as you might expect.
Most meteor flux is from cometary dust, not asteroids. The Geminids and Taurids are asteroid in origin but no meteorites have been traced to those showers.
Once the atmosphere and oceans take care of the majority, only about 10 meteorites of asteroid origin are recoverable each year.
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.
Does this mean Lobo is real?! Oooooh man
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?
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.
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.
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.
Only twice that to Lunar surface is ... dubious.
In situ construction is an option, and while asteroids can be metal-rich, useful in fabricating condenser and evaporator coils, they tend to be refrigerant poor. Substances which have properties of good refrigerants (boiling and volatility at low pressures and temperatures) are poorly retained by microgravity bodies in vacuum.
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.
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.
I feel this question belongs to /r/theydidthemath/
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+...). 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...).
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!)
[1] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/39-our-sol...
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.
I wonder why you believe that. From the next sentence it sounds like you consider humanity spacefaring life. We barelly poked our toes out from our planet. We have less than a hundred individuals who visited a different gravity well and they each only spent a relatively short amount of time there. The physical signatures of our “spacefaring-ness” is practicaly undetectable from interstellar distances. How do you know that there arent like tons of us out there?
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.
Perhaps given they are the from a small gravitational mass, they are much less dense than we'd intuitively expect?
Thanks.
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.
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.
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.
Curation, being a labor process, does not add value to anything.
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).
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.
And then some of that price goes towards technology advancements for future missions.
As to why most readers didn't notice it (myself included):
https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/13946/why-doe...
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.
> 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.