NASA plans seven-year trip to Jupiter – can we come with you, please? NASA has OKed two new missions to study some of the most interesting asteroids in our solar system, as part of its ongoing Discovery mission program. The first mission, named Lucy, will launch in October 2021 and will head off to the gas giant of Jupiter to explore its Trojan zones. These are two points on either side of the …
Why do we believe the words of one or more people over others?
I wasnt there and dont know the guy, but this youtube video suggests its Stanley Kubrick confessing before his death that he was asked by the US Govt to fake the moon landings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR4pf6pp1kQ
Just how hard would it be to keep these things covered up?
Perhaps looking at the types employed in various Govt depts like the military, police & politicians are a clue to the types required to keep things secret from the public in order to keep giving the public HOPE!!!
It seems sci-fi is the new quasi religion thats keeping up with technology, just like humans employed to convert the spoken word from AI agents in realtime to "train" AI's.
A worthwhile film to watch for an alternative perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
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This post has been deleted by its author
"Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system. Lucy, like the human fossil for which it is named, will revolutionize the understanding of our origins."
And she was called Lucy due to some ditty by a popular-at-the-time four piece called The Beatles.
The obvious connection is with Clarke's 2061, where in the aftermath of Jupiter collapsing into a star, it spat out a solid carbon core: essentially a giant diamond, hence the mission to investigate it is Lucy after the obligatory Beatles song. I don't see why this nickel asteroid would have a high carbon/ diamond content.
Isn't it because Lucy was the 'beginning' of modern man so to speak (well, tool using at least) and they see the asteroids of the beginning of the planet formation?
That's how I read it, rather than the Beatles link, although I too appreciate it is a rather tenuous link to origins.
Lucy is going to Jupiter's Trojans. Psyche is going to the large metal asteroid (named Psyche 16). Two missions, one article.
The Trojans are made of the primordial stuff of the solar system, without much in the way of changing via pummeling, heating, irradiating, etc. Lucy is hoped to give us insight on the origins of the solar system, like Lucy the Preserved gave us great insight into the origins of modern humans. Lucy the Preserved was named after the Beatles' song, if I recall.
Psyche 16 is presumed to be the exposed core of a broken planet(-oid?) that may tell us a lot about the earth's core, which we can't get to owing to geology.
Meteoritic iron is usually <250ppm carbon, so I'd expect Psyche to follow suit and be carbon poor. It'll be interesting to see if it does differ markedly from meteoritic iron though which are almost exclusively iron/nickel alloy and if it instead more resembles the Earth's Core.
We're pretty certain that the bulk of the Earth's Core is also iron/nickel, but its density is lower than we'd expect if pure alloy, so there must be other elements dissolved in the alloy. The best candidates are sulfur, oxygen or silicon. Various makeups have been suggested for the Core including 1% or so of FeO or up to 8% FeS. Perhaps Psyche will have a similar chemistry.
And it is going to look astonishing, I'm hoping we'll see something like pallasite meteorites which must be some of the most beautiful geological specimens around (with prices to match):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallasite#/media/File:Esquel.jpg
The outer layers weren't stripped off by " millennia of impacts from space debris." They were stripped off by millennia of righteous power chords and an amp that went all the way to 12.
Come to think of it...maybe Psyche was the magnet for the Solar System's largest speaker. In the hazy days, long before there were mustaines or hammetts or hendricks, there was the first Metal God, Crunch. His strings made of light, his pick made of darkness, with an amp that took a blackhole to power. Rock on, Crunch.
I think they will find Psyche16 is a rounded off Borg cube, they are waiting for the human population to reach 10 billion as they are going for a Guinness assimilation record. The race should hit 10 billion about the same time as FB and twitter et al has melded the majority of the planet into one fatuous hive mind. The last words of the human race will be: Friend me! tweet tweet tweet!
Just think of what will happen if the Borgs assimilated Facebook and started to brag about their assimilations and implants, looking for other young Borgs 'to friend', while being bombed by ads about new implants and cube models, trips to new planets to assimilate, lots of gossip about the Queen, viral videos of cats, and fake news about the galaxy... I believe that's the virus Data planned to use on the captured Borg.
But it was better the plan wasn't carried over. They underestimated the risk of a new Borg leader with an implant of hairs about which even LaForge can't tell the real color...
Shame they called the mission to Psyche, "Psyche".
Given it's a "metal" asteroid (s'posedly) plus it's like a "rock", I'd have thought the mission might have been named "Lemmy" (after the now resting in piece (sic)) former frontman of Motorhead.
With both Lemmy and Lucy heading off to the far reaches, that would give us two music based named missions.
"2010 TK7 has a diameter of about 300 meters (1,000 ft).[4] Its path oscillates about the Sun–Earth L4 Lagrangian point (60 degrees ahead of Earth), shuttling between its closest approach to Earth and its closest approach to the L3 point (180 degrees from Earth) about every 400 years.
The asteroid was discovered in October 2010 by the NEOWISE team of astronomers using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)."
I'm guessing there are probably more, most likely smaller, rocks we haven't found yet.
and imagine what violence it would take to strip the mantel Lithosphere and Asthenosphere from the iron core of a Mars size planet? It boggles the mind!
To add to that, it would have to have been an older planet, because most planets in the solar system developing during this period would have been massive balls of lava. The only reason Earth is late in cooling off, is supposedly because of the Earth Moon collision around 4.5 billion years ago.
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