Oh fuck yeah, it's NASA's first asteroid mining mission. May not be like the Japs' plan to bomb an asteroid, but it'll do cool science like figuring out if asteroids have amino acids and shit. Ya know stuff that life needs.
We have no samples of asteroids of this spectral type. Inb4 meteorites, those are shit samples and because 'you can't know nothing' we can't confirm that they actually came from an asteroid like this.
Those damn japs may beat us to an asteroid of a similar spectral type. Pic related actual image of japanese space probe
Most of the mission objectives were missed but they did manage to send microscopic amounts of asteroid dust back
Xavier Cruz
>that picture
Dominic Thompson
JAXA is amazing at having tons of shit fuck up their missions and still getting something out of it
Michael Ramirez
$800 million for a one-shot experiment to spend seven years fetching a couple of tablespoons of dirt from a space rock, with a high probability of mission failure.
The sheer idiot wastefulness of it is mind-boggling.
This isn't a prototype for a swarm of asteroid-mining drones. The money isn't being spent to get good at this sort of thing and make it affordable to repeat. It's just a science mission.
The budget is entirely out of proportion to the potential benefit. There's no reason not to put this kind of mission off until it can be accomplished more affordably, with cheaper launch (which over $180 million of this project budget is being spent on) and standard components.
Anthony White
Nigga we can't even begin to mine asteroids until we've done the science on them.
so why is dirt important? Well in all likelihood that's what we'd be mining. Scooping dirt takes less energy than turning solid rock into powder necessary for beneficiation and chemical processing.
Thing is dirt is hard to deal with. We can be pretty damn sure a parachute will work on Mars as the atmospheric composition and density pretty much tell use everything we need to know. This we can figure out with telescopes if we have to.
Granular materials are different. As far as we can tell things are dependent on particle shape, size, composition, electrostatic properties, relative humidity, and the phase of the fucking moon. Not to mention most of the properties we want to know when modelling granular materials can only be determined empirically.
Size, shape, and composition are not something we can figure out just using telescopes. Size/shape we can maybe figure out if we know what processes are occuring there, but we don't know. Meteorites are useless for figuring this out cause all the dirt got burned away. Labs aren't that great either because we can't simulate microgravity, and can't wait millions of years for results.
...and to people who say, "that's only $3 per American" or something like that, there's probably well under 80 million real net federal income tax payers.
There are only about 120 million federal income tax payers on paper. Those are adults with jobs or other income sources over a certain threshold. But over 20 million of them collect direct government paychecks. At least another 20 million owe their jobs to services performed under contract to the US government, goods sold to the US government, or goods and services provided to welfare-dependent people. These people are all net tax recipients. Their tax "payment" is really just a pay discount, and not an independent income stream for the government.
So this leaves something under 80 million working men and women whose net taxes (remember: even many net taxpayers owe a portion of their income to government business, which has to be deducted) have to first service a debt burden of about $300,000 each (doubled over the last decade), and pay for major entitlements such as medicare and social security costing around $30,000/year to each, before discretionary spending on things like defense, maintaining the roads, or science can be considered.
The worse it gets, the harder people try to escape the position of taxpayer, by becoming a net tax recipient, a nontaxpayer, through tax sheltering arrangements, by simply breaking the law to evade taxes, or even emigrating.
The funds actually available for such projects are quite limited, and pretending they aren't is the kind of thinking that's breaking the USA. A billion here, a billion there, soon it adds up to real money.
