Cool asteroid discovery video

[Drew]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_d-gs0WoUw


Thought this was pretty cool, it's a video that shows how many asteroids we've discovered since 1980. Red ones cross earth and yellow ones are near earth.

[Parkbandit]

Damn, that is awesome... and scary as hell.

[BriarFox]

Yeah, I agree with PB. That's incredible, and look at that red ring of death around Earth. I had no idea the asteroid belt was THAT huge, either.

[Celephais]

That was fucking awesome. I think it's pretty indicative of what we have yet to discover, there's so much out there and whenever we stare into the nothingness we find it teeming with activity. (Yeah that sounded all stonerish/dumb)

The Hubble iMax thing was pretty awesome, tries to put things into perspective and it's just completely beyond anything I can grasp... I mean you hear we're small/insignificant ... but it's absurd how true it is, I just don't have the imagination to fathom it.

[Celephais]

Damn... seriously, I posted that, and this is what came up in my sig:
http://www.beerzombie.com/images/IncomprehensibleDarkness.png

If there is a god, he speaks to me through Calvin and Hobbes.

[Methais]

Good shit.

[Drew]

Yeah, I agree with PB. That's incredible, and look at that red ring of death around Earth. I had no idea the asteroid belt was THAT huge, either.

It's huge but it's not. There is sooo much more open space than asteroids. Just part of what makes space interesting really. I'm very excited that we will be visiting Ceres (the largest asteroid/minor planet) in five years. It's relatively close to us and we don't have any good pictures of it. And the thing may have a liquid ocean! How cool is that? People always talk about visiting the moon or moon bases or mars bases but it may turn out that Ceres is where humanity colonizes in the future and where we do much of our exploring of the outer solar system.

[BriarFox]

It's huge but it's not. There is sooo much more open space than asteroids. Just part of what makes space interesting really. I'm very excited that we will be visiting Ceres (the largest asteroid/minor planet) in five years. It's relatively close to us and we don't have any good pictures of it. And the thing may have a liquid ocean! How cool is that? People always talk about visiting the moon or moon bases or mars bases but it may turn out that Ceres is where humanity colonizes in the future and where we do much of our exploring of the outer solar system.

I'm waiting for the asteroid mining, a la every sci-fi book ever written. It's all incredibly cool.

[Drew]

I'm waiting for the asteroid mining, a la every sci-fi book ever written. It's all incredibly cool.


I'm thinking that it will only really work to make steel since asteroids do have rare earths but in such small quantities (for instance I read that it takes 10,000 TONS of rock to mine 1 oz of platinum). So you'd have to chew up a lot of asteroids. On the other hand a lot of asteroids have a ton of iron in them, so if you could get a Von Neumann probe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft) that only used iron and carbon it could probably pretty much replicate itself infinitely. The wisdom of that is up for debate.

[Paradii]

I wish they had disabled the comments on that video.

[Celephais]

I was kind of curious so I looked up the ratio of mass of the sun to the rest of the solar system:

Composition Of The Solar System

The Sun contains 99.85% of all the matter in the Solar System. The planets, which condensed out of the same disk of material that formed the Sun, contain only 0.135% of the mass of the solar system. Jupiter contains more than twice the matter of all the other planets combined. Satellites of the planets, comets, asteroids, meteoroids, and the interplanetary medium constitute the remaining 0.015%. The following table is a list of the mass distribution within our Solar System.
Sun: 99.85%
Planets: 0.135%
Comets: 0.01% ?
Satellites: 0.00005%
Minor Planets: 0.0000002% ?
Meteoroids: 0.0000001% ?
Interplanetary Medium: 0.0000001% ?

http://www.solarviews.com/eng/solarsys.htm

[Mighty Nikkisaurus]

Can't help but think of dark matter, at the least.

[Methais]

I wish they had disabled the comments on that video.

Don't read them.

[Proxy]

Best youtube I've ever seen. Awesome, and I'm still a little awed at the gravitational impact our sun has. Keeping all that crap spinning like it does is epic.

Edit: and lesser so on the fact that our little ball of mud hasn't been obliterated by spacial gatling spray.

[Celephais]

Anyone know what technology it was that was employed in 2010 that allowed for a sudden ability to detect asteroids at dusk/dawn? Unless I'm mistaken about the way the video is portrayed, you can see that almost all the discoveries are made looking away from the sun, presumably because of the least interference, when all the sudden in 2010 they start discovering asteroids perpendicular to the line drawn through the earth from the sun (and oddly trended towards that perpendicular line, not the angles between).

[droit]

From the video description:



At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths.

[Celephais]

That'll teach me not to read the description, there's a bunch of cool info in that description! Thanks!