Recently the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency sent a spaceship to an asteroid named Itokawa. A spaceship to an asteroid!! As if that wasn't awesome enough, the spaceship landed on the asteroid, collected material, and returned home to earth! These are images of tiny particles collected from the surface of that asteroid.
These particles are around half the diameter of a human hair. Click to make them HUGE!
Here are three views of Itokawa, which is about 630 meters x 250 meters. Assuming a spacesuit didn't slow you down, and the surface of the asteroid were boulder-free and easy to walk on, it would only take you ~20 minutes to walk around the whole thing the long-way. Pretty small!!
As you may know, on October 4th a reservoir retaining wall collapsed near Kolontar Hungary, releasing over 180 million gallons of what is being called "toxic red sludge". Before we delve into the nature of this sludge and why it is produced, here is an insane video of the sludge flowing through Kolontar:
I've been thinking a lot recently about time scales, how quickly and/or slowly things happen, and how we humans perceive that.
Look at how slowly this mudslide happens!!!! Way more slowly than I thought mudslides would ever happen. This is from southern italy, where 200 residents were evacuated to avoid this really slow mud.
According to howstuffworks.com, mudslides can sometimes reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. The speed of the mudslide increases as the soil contains more water or the slope is more steep. So, just based on what we can see visually from this video, the mud looks a lot like dirt, meaning there is not much water, and the slope is not that steep, so it makes sense that this mudslide is relatively slow. It also makes sense that the slower a mudslide is, the more likely it is to be caught on video, which might be one reason that this is the only mudslide video i can find on the internet. EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE!!!!!!!
