Why do we need to know this when so many here on earth have so little to eat. Will knowledge learned benefit them?
This is a worth achievement but I am not sure it makes scientific sense. Meteorites are mostly asteroidal material. Only a thin surface layer is affected by coming through the atmosphere. We have countless tons of the stuff. If you want more, you can pick it off the ice in anarctica, for one example. You don’t get to pick where it is from but you can sort it by class. Space flight is a whole lot of effort to get material which may be had much more easily.
It's amazing what centrifugal force can do to a heavenly body. And what heavenly bodies sometimes do to our planet.
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We reach into the night sky and see wonders never imagined. And maybe - just possibly - bring home part of that wonder.
The photo alone is an incredible achievement. A lifetime ago it would have been fiction and yet here it is, testiment that amazing things are still happening, that we have transcended the heavens.
Curiosity Knowledge. Exploration.
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Fascinating stuff, and it gives me hope. It's great to look up from the toxic sludge of current politics, and the bloodbath of Syria, and so on, into the beauty and grandeur of space.
These carboniferous asteroids can tell us quite a bit about how life got started, what our early solar system was like, and what we'll be able to do when we achieve mining them for resources.
Also I have a quibble with, "Asteroids are bits and pieces leftover from the disc of gas and dust that formed around the young sun and never quite coalesced into a planet." This is partially true, but not entirely. The asteroid belt is composed of bits of rock like this. But this asteroid isn't from that belt, and we can't say precisely where it came from. This could be a rock broken off when our moon was formed (several theories on that, all with a collision), or could even be an interstellar wanderer that fell into orbit around our sun. It's possible this excursion will tell us more about this asteroid's origins.
In the bigger picture, the mere fact that this asteroid exists tells us some things that are pretty contentious. First, the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran are all factually incorrect. Obviously, they only go back about 6,000 years, whereas this rock is about 4.5 billion years old. Second, humanity is just not that big a deal. The building blocks of life are all around and the universe is incomprehensibly vast. And to the U.S.: the conquerors of space don't have to be us.
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Why is there only 1 comment?
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Thank you for still covering science in this anti intellectual climate we are experiencing. It is refreshing to escape the idiotic behavior of humans. Even for a moment.
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