
Hayabusa2 is leaving the asteroid Ryugu and heading back to Earth - sohkamyung
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/hayabusa2-is-leaving-the-asteroid-ryugu-and-heading-back-to-earth
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LilBytes
The level of engineering behind this is such an amazing feat.

Landing a satellite on an asteroid, and then shooting it with rare minerals to
cause debris to shoot off, to then be collected and later analysed by
scientists here on Earth? All while in flight? And there's enough fuel to give
this another crack on a _second_ asteroid?

I remember buying dinosaur and space magazines that often had collectable
assets (like, each magazine collection would build an entire glow in the dark
T Rex skeleton or similar, each magazine came with one bone and you had to get
20+ magazines for the entire 1:200 scale skeleton... we'd probably call this
DLC now) and being absolutely amazed at what was written within.

This article brings about the exact same glee and nostalgia.

~~~
overlordalex
> This article brings about the exact same glee and nostalgia.

Phil Plait is one of my favourite science writers, and has been consistently
putting out great "bad astronomy" blog posts for years (decades?). If you want
more of his writing you can check out the website:
[http://www.badastronomy.com/index.html](http://www.badastronomy.com/index.html)

~~~
thiagoeh
Thanks for the recommendation. After spending some minutes browsing the
content, I was delighted.

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unlinked_dll
I know we don't live in the Apollo era, and timelines are much longer for
space missions - but it's such a great time to look to the skies and imagine
where we'll be within our lifetimes.

Hats off to the people that work night and day to get these widgets to their
destinations, perform their jobs, and bring them home. I wish my skillset
translated to these fields because I'd take a 50% paycut and ditch all my
options to go into the field in a heartbeat.

~~~
tzfld
You're right. The timelines are so long, I'm pretty sure more than a few
exciting and really expensive space missions you will not see in your
lifetime. We are at hundreds of years from real space colonies.

~~~
xvilka
Invest in cryonics and be able to wake up in time.

~~~
neuronic
Entrust your body to a corporation? Only once the end of normal life is nigh
anyways.

~~~
Navarr
Welcome to Night Vale has an interesting take on this, which is:

Why should the future care about you or your desires? To the future, you are
simply a resource.

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yummybear
"...accelerating the probe to a meager 9.2 centimeters per second relative to
the asteroid (slower than a snowflake falls on Earth), but that was enough to
give it enough velocity to escape"

That is pretty insane.

~~~
jansan
Without gravity and atmosphere you can do pretty neat tricks with very little
energy.

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annoyingnoob
I'm going with Arthur C Clarke on this one

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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jtchang
If we could just get these probes to be cheap enough we could conceivably mine
asteroids. Then again the economics just don't make sense since we have plenty
to mine on Earth already.

~~~
BurningFrog
If we can get a few metal asteroid to earth, prices would fall to near nothing
and we could close all mines for the metals that are out there.

~~~
unnouinceput
No they won't. Even if you get as big as this one the article is talking about
to be full of gold and drop it directly in backyard of a gold smelting factory
it will barely make a dent in the price of gold. Plus our entire technology is
based on using silver and gold for circuitry, so it will get absorbed really
fast in the market. Currently we have so much of a shortage that we recycle
old boards to extract the metals in them.

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humbledrone
All of the gold that has ever been mined by humanity over the last few
thousand years would fit in a cube about 21 meters per edge. So I think that
actually it would make a big difference to grab something this size made out
of gold.

[https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-
mining/how-...](https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-supply/gold-mining/how-
much-gold)

~~~
7952
I wonder what the best way to sell that would be? Maybe just slowly release it
and use the asset as security on loans. That way you maintain the high price
and get access to capital.

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eru
Depends on whether you keep it private.

If people know it's going to be released, it doesn't make too much of a
difference exactly how long you are going to take.

(Unless you go really, really slow.)

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nsm
I’m always reminded of Warren Ellis’ talk “How to see the Future” when I read
stuff like this. We have to strive to reduce the banality with which we view
the world, and things like this go a long way.

[http://www.warrenellis.com/how-to-see-the-
future/](http://www.warrenellis.com/how-to-see-the-future/)

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wiz21c
Is it me or those asteroids seem so lonely in space ? Their black skies and
cold light makes them so desolate...

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mattr47
What about possible contamination from something on or on the asteroid?

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patagonia
Definitely the beginning of a sci-fi horror movie plot...

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linuxftw
Imagine how much rain forest we could have saved with the money used to fund
this program.

More wasteful space spending to satisfy the less than 1% of space geeks that
are interested in this nonsense.

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tonetheman
I am now worried that this day will looked back on later in history as the
start of the alien wars.

~~~
sohkamyung
I doubt it. We've been crashing things into comets and asteroids before this.

Like the Deep Impact mission in 2005. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_\(spacecraft\))

