• Iconoclast@feddit.ukEnglish
    16 days

    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.

    • BigBrownDog@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
      16 days

      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.

      • CeeBee_Eh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16 days

        I hope he’s not watching David Weiss’ content. He keeps showing an image that was taken on earth, modified to look like Mars, and then claims it’s directly from NASA’s website.

        Whenever he’s asked for the direct source he says he’ll send it over, but never does.

      • deft@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        16 days

        Tell him if they faked it. Russia would not waste a moment to point that out.

        • BigBrownDog@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
          16 days

          They congratulated us. If we faked it, Russia would have faked it first.

    • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      There are barely visible tiny features that would have eroded away on Earth.

      That said, they are barely visible and tiny. If somebody said it’s just some weird concretion, I’d completely believe it.

    • Obinice@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      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

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      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.

    • ShadowRam@fedia.io
      16 days

      There’s absolutely no sense of scale here.

      What we see as rocks, could absolutely be boulders…

      We’d tend to error of the side of ‘small’ but with no fluid (liquid or air) erosion, these could be massive.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      I worked on Landsat 9 a few years ago, and when I got on-console for my first shift after it launched, I remembered seeing the telemetry come down and thinking, huh, doesn’t look any different than when we simulated the data…how do I know we actually sent it up there?

      Then something went wrong that i had to fix and I snapped back to reality.

  • Thorry@feddit.orgEnglish
    16 days

    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!

        • DokPsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
          15 days

          Cries in astrophotographer in the suburbs who’s had one cloudless night in a fortnight

          • snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            15 days

            Every time I have no clouds here it’s the moon, like ok yes moon I do enjoy taking pictures of you but can you disappear a bit more?

            • DokPsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
              14 days

              I had a few glorious dark (for bortle 5-6) nights and was able to get a lot of nice eagle nebula shots a month or so ago. I’m constantly battling the hippie ‘don’t cut down the few old trees left in this suburb’ part of me with the ‘get your leaves and branches out of my damn shot, I’m trying to capture space’ part

      • 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish
        15 days

        endless abyss with distant pockets of potential wonder!

        (Lovecraft vs Star Trek)

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16 days

    I’m not sure why but this fills me with such inconsolable dread. Something about a dead cold rock floating through such vast nothingness.

    • Joeffect@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      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.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.netEnglish
      16 days

      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.

    • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15 days

      No, no, no. It actually isn’t lifeless. It contains some small microbes that are virtually undetectable. Their only effect on the human psyche is to create paranoia, delusions of grandeur, and remove all traces of empathy.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      It kind of reminds me of the comet from Outer Wilds, which was kinda spooky, in terms of having to land on this tiny object traveling very fast through space and navigate it

  • WanderWisley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16 days

    Not even surprised that a hayabusa would be fast enough to make it to an asteroid.

  • PushButton@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16 days

    I’m just thinking about all the technical challenges to land a flying metal cereal box on a moving asteroid…

    Man, this rocks.

    • DokPsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      It just took a collection of bombs and careful aiming. We as a species are really good at throwing things pretty accurately and at messing with controlling fire

      I kid, it’s awesome we were able to make it happen and the wealth of knowledge gained by doing it

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zipEnglish
      15 days

      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.

    • WoodScientist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      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.

    • eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14 days

      It is a very safe place, as all people are extremely far away.

    • kalpol@lemmy.caEnglish
      16 days

      My take on it is that it’s a lot of fluffy stuff just collected together and eventually mashed down under its own worth, so you aren’t far off

  • Naz@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15 days

    I think the primary reason there’s so much psychological revulsion in this thread is because the only times you see something like this on Earth is in deep cave footage

    And typically these types of ecological niches are completely filled with insects

    Evolution primes the brain to pay attention to threats

    No insects? They’re hiding. —> Dread/Fear

  • DoubleDongle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16 days

    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.

    • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
      16 days

      Now also imagine the view when you’re there and you turn off the light.

      Black will be really fucking black and you will only see some stars

    • eleitl@lemmy.zipEnglish
      14 days

      If you can’t even make renewable energy harvesting infrastructure with just renewable inputs, which space mining?