capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years.
The asteroid samples were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert. The unofficial touchdown time was 8:52 a.m. MT, 3 minutes ahead of the predicted landing time.
Not only for bringing the sample back, but OSIRIS is heading back out to rendezvous with a different asteroid. It’s may not bring back samples this time, but it blows my mind it was able to pick up samples from one asteroid, drop it off in a flyby of Earth, then head back out for more experiments.
Why on earth (pun intended) would we be wasting billions of dollars on these space and science programs when we could be putting all that money into social programs in this country?
I. Am. Being. Sarcastic.
And I agree, amazing and incredible accomplishment.
Using the sun’s gravity the NASA Parker Solar Probe reached a speed of around 330,000 mph. It did seven Venus flybys over seven years to gradually shrink its elliptical orbit around the Sun using gravity assists to increase its speed.
I don’t think in our lifetime. I would think you would have to have a processing station in the asteroid belt itself to get the actual needed raw materials to and from Earth or it would be expensive. A processing station would be a huge undertaking. Not just the facility design and infrastructure itself to safely support human life, but a space living generation of people that more than likely would never live on Earth itself, just in space, working to provide raw materials to Earth. That would be a tough life. I don’t think robotics could do it all.
Possible with current human tech? In General? Yes to the first, and so slow as to be almost useless in terms distances on a galactic scale. We will have to do considerably better to even reach the closest stars not our own, and even then, it would take generational times lengths. That’s why scientists are not skeptical about life existing in the galaxy, much less the universe, but are skeptical they could have visited us. Those are two totally different issues.
If none of you have seen “The Expanse” on Amazon Prime, it pretty accurately sums this up. It even does a decent job of showing how effed up the planet will be when the NWO finally gets the UN running one world government. People that think like you and I not wanting to be a part of that will be living on Mars.
Sadly, short of an accidental discovery, I think we are centuries away from inter-stellar travel. For perspective, landing a living human on the closest exoplanet in our galaxy is as unreachable to us right now, as the moon was to the cavemen 10,000 years ago. There is NO DOUBT there is intelligent life out there somewhere. Sadly, I doubt we will ever see proof though in my lifetime. I’m not talking microbes in a body of water, I’m talking intelligent beings that have evolved into a society.
This is why I think “The Expanse” was so accurate. 200-300 years from now, we will still be just barely making it around our own solar system.
The Expanse is exactly where my mind went when considering this. At some point in human history, our mining efforts on this planet will “play out” and they’ll have to consider options outside our gravity field.
FWIW, The Expanse is probably one of the most underrated TV programs I’ve ever watched. It’s worth the price of Prime alone. I just wish they’d been able to complete the series as written. When I retire and finally have time on my hands, reading the book series will be near the top of my to-do list.
That was the reason for my question. Based on the answers theoretically it is entirely feasible. Can we do it? IDK, I guess we did but I find it hard to believe.
