A long way, and a lot of money, for half a cup.

$10M/gram, good stuff

  • @xantoxis@lemmy.world
    42•9 months ago

    Yes, as we all know “how much it weighs” is the most important consideration of something’s value.

  • @sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
    35•9 months ago

    OSIRIS-REx mission lands on an asteroid, and then returns to earth with its sample…and people are bitching because they didn’t bring back more than they could use anyway? Holy shit, talk about missing the entire point.

    • thragtacular
      14•9 months ago

      Idiots will always idiot. Like the old stories of $3,000 toilet seats that idiots swore were government waste… despite the fact that said toilet seats were on the fucking Space Shuttle (IIRC).

      People with zero sense of scale. That’s the real issue.

    • @kernelle@0d.gs
      3•9 months ago

      When the article mentioned it was more than twice the target value I knew this was just a puff piece

  • @brbposting@sh.itjust.works
    15•9 months ago

    But, as the saying goes, good things come in small packages. And small though the sample may be, it is 20 times greater than the amount of asteroid material previously returned to Earth by a pair of Japanese sample return missions. A little will go a long way as scientists study the organics and other materials in this asteroid dust to divine clues to the origin of life and conditions that existed at the dawn of our Solar System. You don’t need handfuls of material to get a meaningful result from an electron microscope.

    Moreover, the sample retrieval was double the minimum requirement for the mission, 60 grams. So, OSIRIS-REx can now definitively be labeled as an unqualified success.