FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home A NASA probe has just now collected material from the surface of asteroid Bennu, some 200 million miles (322 million km) from Earth. Over the course of four hours, the agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft inched toward its target on Bennu – a 16-metre-wide crater named Nightingale – at a nail-biting pace of just 0.2 miles per hour. …
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There's a horrible, whimsical but cynical part of me that imagines two NASA scientists completing analysis of the sample, and one turns to the other and just says "yup, it's dirt."
The take-home, really, is that it's amazing what insight is extracted - daily - by experts from what to non-experts is meaningless triviality. Great respects to the educated in all fields of study.
and just says "yup, it's dirt."
Unlikely given how few bacteria and worms there are in space - the majority of usual soil is lifeforms of various sorts and the... 'output' of said creatures.
Pedantic I know. But without pedantry, where are we?
Well, firstly, we obviously want samples from as many places as we can get them: having a single sample is like concluding things about the composition of Earth from material scraped from the Empire State building: you can say something but you'd really like samples from as many different locations as you can get.
Secondly, Hayabusa returned under 1g of material (and I think perhaps a lot under 1g: there's some estimate that they got 60mg somewhere): OSIRIS-REx wants to obtain at least 60g and they hope up to 1kg. So they're aiming to bring back hundreds-to-thousands of times the mass of sample.
None of this is meant to denigrate the Hayabusa mission which was clearly heroic: Apollo 11 didn't bring back much compared to the later Apollo missions, either!
Not sure about the garden, but the sample may be consistent with that found in Iceland. Which is often used as a stand-in for alien landscapes.
But here's one I prepared earlier..
The OSIRIS-REx team will check images of the equipment, and perform a series of spins to find out how much extra mass the spacecraft has acquired.
It's 62g! Yey! Then it's 124g! Ermm.. Then 248g! And it's still heading for small town USA
Ok, never mind the physics, and the sample really needs to be 64g. Because IT, and 2^8 it. I'm fairly sure NASA's got thorough biosafety plans for the sample, because there are plenty of science movies highlighting the dangers of space rocks. Especially if consumed with coke.
But I digress.. And more mindful of the physics, this is pretty awesome engineering to not miss the rock, not hit the rock, and park just right to collect the sample. It'll be fascinating to see what the sample is, and conclusions drawn from it.
... fairly sure NASA's got thorough biosafety plans for the sample ...
I hope so.
Because, notwithstanding this absolutely incredible feat, we really do not know what is coming along (if anything) with what has been scooped up and that is a fact, not a conspiracy or a sci-fi flick script.
In the far depths of our underexplored seas, scientists have been surprised to find living organisms in places with an absolute lack of light, extreme temperatures and pressures as well as a highly toxic environment.
Just a thought.
O.
Yes, keeping it free of contamination is pretty much the number one priority. Not because it might introduce an incurable plague to humanity (we already have one thanks, try next door!) but they need to make sure the sample is not contaminated by anything earthly which could ruin the science.
Erm ... ITYM 2^6
Err.. umm.. Yes, I meant if it stopped gaining mass at 2^8, then we'd know if it was an ate bit organism. Also might explain why I never got a call back from NASA about that rocket scientist gig.*
*Then again, before being disinvited from an Inteplanetary Internet group, I did get to meet some. Purpose was to get Ciscos In Spaaaace! and I made the mistake about questioning the choice of IP. Especially when the comms protocols NASA uses are damn clever & a lot more reliable/efficient than IP. Be glad comms to this probe weren't sent as a UDP stream..
The nearby Hoover is not only a plain vacuum cleaner[0], it also has a rotating bristle that should sweep up the dust, even if it sticks a bit, and deposit it in the dust bag.
And there was a scoop specified for filling the ziploc in the case he hasn't taken the Hoover, for instance because there weren't enough extension cords available
[0] so, meant to clean a vacuum, innit?
I don't envy the programme's decision makers right now. Unless by some weird chance the sample collection bin is full, it must be tempting to go in again for another mouthful; after all, nobody is going to be back there soon. On the other hand (the one with the bird in it?) is it worth the risk of losing everything by going back down, dinging Mount Doom or doing a Philae, and not getting anything home at all.
Tough one.
They'll have decided in advance what to do given whatever range of masses they retrieve. I'm guessing, given the consistent "60g" message we've been getting, that's the breakpoint: less than that then they're going back. The risks associated with the landing are considerable: it's better to have 62g of dust than none at all.
Hoping it's not being delivered via FedEx or similar, as it'll probably be left tucked behind the moon for safe keeping instead of actually delivering it to Earth. I'm basing this on a recent delivery. Other delivery providers are available, and likely to exhibit the same behaviours.
Hermes once delivered my package to a random address a mile away. I only knew about it because the kind lady who lived there literally went the extra mile and brought me the package. There are still some good people out there.
On another occasion I found my package in a hedge bottom twenty yards from my address, it was soaked after being out in the rain for a week.
Hermes recently "delivered" a package to my wife, which they claimed was in "an outhouse". The GPS tracking they provided showed it in the middle of a nearby road. We live in a flat in the middle of a city; outhouses there ain't. We never worked out where they "delivered" it to, but they refused to acknowledge that we hadn't got it!
DPD, on the other hand, always go to the same incorrect nearby address, despite anything they deliver being correctly addressed, as do most Deliveroo riders, so plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
I wonder how many of them whoop and cheer just because it's expected? NASA engineers have been enthusiastically whooping & cheering at work since the Sixties. I guess that no-one wants to be first to admit that maybe they're acting out a bit of a cliché.
(Or maybe I'm just bitter. I can't even remember the last time I whooped, let alone felt like whooping at work...)
I think you may be being a little unfair. After all the expectations and the cost, and the fact some of their jobs depend on success a few uncontrolled whoops of joy and cheering are surely expected.
Plus, if Hollywood movies and TV shows are anything to go by, they get a lot of whooping and cheering practice at 'football', basketball and rounders (sorry, baseball) games while at school.
I think they whoop and cheer because they (most of them) are Americans, and whooping and cheering seems to be a thing Americans do, culturally, a lot more than we do.
If this was a British mission then at some point a phone would ring, and the head boffin would pick it up, saying 'Swindon 243', listen for a moment, say 'good, good bye', put the handset down and turn back to his[*] pages of calculations. In the background, lesser boffins would be adjusting the controls of some large machine with many spools of tape. Perhaps a teleprinter would chatter in the distance. Later, tea and biscuits would be served.
[*] yes. It is, after all, 1954.
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