Picture from the lander is neat too
https://www.space.com/asteroid-ryugu-survived-major-catastrophe.html

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
I’m not sure why but this fills me with such inconsolable dread. Something about a dead cold rock floating through such vast nothingness.
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.
Thanks, I hate it. No chance of any sleep tonight.
😄
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.
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.

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
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 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.

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.

Except no weathering.
There is lots of weathering on mars
But not on an asteroid
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
I'm just thinking about all the technical challenges to land a flying metal cereal box on a moving asteroid...
Man, this rocks.
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.
That is definitely a pile of dirt. Sweet.


Alright, this gives me crazy heebie jeebies. Something about how close that horizon is, combined with the fact that beyond it is just nothing, absolute nothing, for light-years in most directions; hits the buttons for claustrophobia, agoraphobia, acrophobia, and thalassophobia at the same time.
I have never felt happy about the fact that I was born too early to go space mining til now. No thanks. Maybe if I get to keep a ton or two of native platinum for myself, otherwise no thanks.
What's the scale?
Someone forgot to bring banana
why this scary
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.
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.
Looks like the insulation in my attic.
It super does look like that!
Something about it is a bit nauseating
It looks super cool
This is cool and all, and I am super stoked we can do this...but my brain keeps saying, yeah, so what, it's a big rock.
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dart board;; science bs
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