It reminds me of city snow piles that are almost melted out.
This is fascinating, this rock that hurtals threw the black void of space for billions of years, and here it is. Photographed. If we can get here, we can go anywhere.
Voyager could reach Proxima Centauri in about 75000 years at the current speed (if it was aimed at it).
The biology, sociology and physics of interstellar travel are brutal and unforgiving.
Yes, but as long as we don’t self-destroy, I’m pretty certain we’ll master it. The achievements of humanity are already remarkable. I mean, being able to split atoms and safely harness the produced energy is pretty incredible. Fusion, which seems impossible in many aspects, is closer and closer to our grasp every day. I am convinced that interstellar travel in a reasonable time for humans will be achieved eventually. But of course not in our lifetime, far from it.
The problem is it is a hard, physical limit imposed by spacetime itself. No matter the source the energy required to go even a fraction of the speed of light is beyond belief.
Disclaimer: I’m nowhere close to being a professional in the field. If you are or simply know more than I do, please correct me.
But interstellar travel doesn’t have to be based on higher speed, just like we didn’t expand our energy production by mining and burning coal faster. We found ways that produce much, much more energy in the same time without needing to keep improving our fuel production. Why wouldn’t we be able to find ways to travel much, much further in the same time without improving our speed?
We know spacetime can theoretically be manipulated: anything with a mass does to some extent. Why wouldn’t we be able to harness that someday?
If we can get here, we can go anywhere
in a few thousand years at light speed.
Not quite anywhere. The rocket equation is a bitch that way. Nor does the hardware live forever, or even us.
Space isnt quite empty either. There maybe extremely few particles in space, but its more than zero. Spacecraft will slow down and stop eventually. It just takes a long time.
I think the primary reason there’s so much psychological revulsion in this thread is because the only times you see something like this on Earth is in deep cave footage
And typically these types of ecological niches are completely filled with insects
Evolution primes the brain to pay attention to threats
No insects? They’re hiding. —> Dread/Fear
While there is an Air and Space museum, there is no air in space.
why this scary
It is a very safe place, as all people are extremely far away.
Immediately made me think of Lake Mungo
Have you ever thought about what it must be like in space? That shit is scary. We take for granted that we have an atmosphere to disperse light, as well as a ground for light to reflect off of. In space, some shit could be right in front of you and you would have no idea. If there were an asteroid between you and the sun, you wouldn’t realize until it was so close that there was a huge black spot covering the sun up.
screams
Sponsored by Soundgarden.
This makes me feel a bit nauseous.
Perhaps because you can see mountains at the same scale that allows you to clearly see the object’s horizon/curvature. It would be like if Earth had mountains thousands of miles high. It’s a landscape that feels deeply unnatural.
Because of the soildier attempting to hide behind the rock (middle right)
Something about it is a bit nauseating
It looks super cool
Here’s an article about this rock
It would have been cool if they had named the spacecraft Urashima since they were going to Ryugu, but I guess it wouldn’t make sense because in the story, the gift Urashima brings back from Ryugu ends up fucking him over. At least, that’s how I understood it as a kid.
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
Cries in astrophotographer in the suburbs who’s had one cloudless night in a fortnight
Every time I have no clouds here it’s the moon, like ok yes moon I do enjoy taking pictures of you but can you disappear a bit more?
I had a few glorious dark (for bortle 5-6) nights and was able to get a lot of nice eagle nebula shots a month or so ago. I’m constantly battling the hippie ‘don’t cut down the few old trees left in this suburb’ part of me with the ‘get your leaves and branches out of my damn shot, I’m trying to capture space’ part
What do you mean “asteroid”? That’s my basement. /j
Your vacuflo might need a emptied dude
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 😜
?It just means fast lol. Hayabusa is just Japanese for peregrine falcon, the haya probably deriving from fast, busa being some sort of suffix used for animals, I think (don’t quote me on that last bit).
I’m 98% sure my source is correct
98.9% at least
I’m not sure why but this fills me with such inconsolable dread. Something about a dead cold rock floating through such vast nothingness.
It rather gives me comfort.
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
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.
Not at all. Perhaps I’m weirder than I thought.
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.
So a regular day, just add the vacuum of space, for me then. Good to know
Thanks, I hate it. No chance of any sleep tonight.
😄
You’re welcome friend <3
Picture from the lander is neat too
https://www.space.com/asteroid-ryugu-survived-major-catastrophe.html
I expected to see more stars. Maybe the exposure was too short for that or something
Yes
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 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
Why isn’t this sentence “a guy I know”
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.
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.
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
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 just thinking about all the technical challenges to land a flying metal cereal box on a moving asteroid…
Man, this rocks.
It just took a collection of bombs and careful aiming. We as a species are really good at throwing things pretty accurately and at messing with controlling fire
I kid, it’s awesome we were able to make it happen and the wealth of knowledge gained by doing it
