Asteroid Particles

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!!

Why Pee is Cool - entry #6 - "Pee, Our Connection with the Earth's Metabolic Cycle"

Here, in the final PeePeePost, is where we bring all we have learned together and find out how the act of peeing unites us with our planet.

sciseekclaimtoken-4eab48c19bc77 Any form of life that we know of needs two basic things.  The first is matter, as life has to be made of something.  The second is energy, so life can do something with that matter (e.g., move around, reproduce, watch trailer park boys).  Most life on earth gets its energy from the sun.  All life on earth gets its matter from...from earth, duh!

As we learned in the last PeePost, the atoms in your body are no different from the atoms in rocks/oceans/air/etc.  Additionally, the composition of our bodies is close-ish to that of the earth's crust!!

Graph of abundances of chemical elements in the earths' upper continental crust.  We are made mostly of the really abundant stuff in the upper left (e.g., oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, etc.)

Because of those two facts, I like to think of any kind of earth life as little tiny earth particles--walking, talking, peeing, sometimes neighborly little chunks of the earth's crust.

Humans are earth particles.

the moon dude, the moon

Unfortunately right now the moon is waning (each night less area visible from earth is illuminated by the sun).

But once the moon comes back in all its glory, you should go outside and stare at it for a while. I am serious. You should try do this as much as possible, it can be kind of like meditation, which might improve your health.

Forty years ago the first chunks of living, conscious earth matter purposefully moved themselves from their home of the past 4.6 billion years to personally investigate and witness the earth's long-time companion, the moon.  The little astronauts and their little ship, which you can think of as little tiny particles of the earths' crust--earth particles, traveled over 200,000 miles! In absolute vacuum!! What were those earth particles thinking???!!! So dangerous! (p.s. I'm mega jealous). Now, in case you didn't go outside and stare at it yet, here is a high-quality picture of the moon (click for bigger picture):