Images of the the samples returned to earth from the asteroid Ryugu

Semi-related, the Hayabusa 2 has an incredibly cool real time dashboard that&#x27;s publicly accessible [0].<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;haya2now.jp&#x2F;en.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;haya2now.jp&#x2F;en.html</a>

I can already tell that those aluminum pieces are going to jumpstart their own conspiracies

Pardon 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?

Things you find everywhere you look: scraps of aluminum foil. Styrofoam pellets. Dog hair.

So wouldn&#x27;t the obvious thing be that this asteroids composition would be almost identical to the earth&#x27;s since, of course, our planet was formed by billions of these things crashing into it?<p>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.<p>Is this true?

There is an interesting near-future thriller about mining Ryugu - “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez, the same author of “Daemon”.

Can’t talk about moon rocks without thinking of this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rocks#Theft_of_NASA_rocks" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...</a>

Sometime in the future, we will be mining millions of tons of these! Start of something beautiful.

One thing I&#x27;ll be interested to see if there are any heavy elements in the samples.<p>Why? Because anything from the Uranium decay chain effectively dates the creation of those elements.<p>I belong to the school of thought that believes that spacefaring life is relatively rare. By &quot;rare&quot; 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&#x27;s a whole separate topic.<p>Anyway, this then raises the issue of the Fermi Paradox. One angle might be the relative abundance of elements heavier than iron.<p>Elements up to iron are relatively common in the Universe because they&#x27;re created by nuclear fusion. More specifically, nuclear fusion of elements up to iron produces energy.<p>Heavier elements are produced by supernovae or the merger of neutron stars and&#x2F;or black holes (as we&#x27;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 &quot;rare&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve seen some discussion of this for Earth-bound materials suggesting they were created 80-200 million years (IIRC) before the Earth was.<p>So I&#x27;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.

This is the start of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asteroid_mining" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Asteroid_mining</a> . In a surprise move Elon Musk will soon scrap his plans for Mars an become even richer by mining rare earth materials from asteroids ;-)

On a side note, what are the odds that there is a giant gold asteroid, floating around out there in the asteroid belt?<p>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.<p>The same idea can be said for something like gold or platinum.

It looks way more than few milligrams.

Forgive 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?

Unfortunately 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

It&#x27;s interesting how the curation of this material makes it worth $250M vs. any kind of rarity or value of the constituent compounds.

There are two &quot;the&quot;s in the HN title.

These images are remarkably low resolution. Like someone used a handheld digital camera from 2002.

Best unboxing ever.

&gt; Artificial material seems to be present in chamber C<p>What good is this if they’re guessing at it being a contaminant they introduced?<p>At least say it’s possible that it isn’t. Maybe it really had metal fragments on it.

What&#x27;s in the samples? What kind of materials?

Why they call it astrobiology? Would be perhaps more correct &quot;biochemistry&quot;.