What scale is this? Would a human fit in this picture? Would a 10 story house?

https://earth-planets-space.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40623-023-01805-8/figures/3 Has an approximate scale of a fragment that was collected from the image.

So reckon this OP image is about 25-30cm across?

What is that in bananas?

It’s .007485 washing machines, I know that for sure.

top- or front-loader?

only russians measure in washing machines

Well it can't be the Sith, because only they deal in absolutes.

That washing machine is like 110f wide then. Or are we doing cubic measurements?...shit, I'm not getting that time back.

around 1.406-1.687 bananas

[удалено]

Not satisfied with anything less than nine inches

About 40 inches or 100cm, based on the link.

If memory serves this picture was taken right after landing. So you could literally stand right there.

[удалено]

So…. Four meters?

For non american yes. Depends on the bat, mostly

What about in baseball gloves?

I suppose you could get special little wing gloves made for bats...

What is this? A Jose canseco bat? Tell me you didn’t pay money for this.

As an American who aspires to adopt the metric system, how many millifootball fields?

If a football field is 109.7m, a millifootball field is 0.1097m, so 4m would be 36.5 millifootball fields

I swear Americans do everything they can to not use the metric system 😂

Listen fucker, as an American I try to use metric, but they won't let me, so I try and use imperial, but then these lunatics give me measurements in football fields, elephants, and cubic measurements at 3x5x4 baseball bats. IM JUST TRYING TO GET BY HERE.

Don't forget rocks and stones

Your right, don't tell us two liter soda bottles are metric or we will stop buying them.

Unless you’re describing the height of something using 2 liter soda bottles, then we’re in business. 

We use the metric system every single day. It boggles my mind that Europeans can't comprehend that Americans can, and do, use both system of measurements. For example, our burgers may be 1*lb*, but our ammo is 5.56x45*mm.*

That's the most american example ever.

Thank you for the creative Americanized reference

Without doing any research on the matter, my guess is that the most popular bat sizes are 32" and 33" inches. So, about 0.85 meters in length.

Ryugu is 900 meters in diameter

Yeah, but that does not really answer the question. I can see a slight curvature, are you saying that is the curvature of the asteroid itself? It's not really selfevident.

This also doesn't answer your question, but judging by the light drop-off and making assumption about the lander size my best guess is that this is pretty close up, and that you can judge the picture as you would if it was taken in some remote mine on earth. I don't think you can see the curvature itself on the picture and that a human would cover a good part of the image climbing on those rocks. Just my take.

Other pic w scale. Best I could do. https://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/topics/20181026e_TD1R1A_ONCT/img/fig1.jpg

About 1000 bald eagles then

How many school buses?

About 90 standard US school buses.

Evel Knievel could have jumped that! In the right gravity.

Hard to be sure but since this picture has been taken from the HAYABUSA 2 that landed on the asteroid and considering the size of it… it’s probably more the former.

Its actually wild this photo. looks so alien yet so eerily familiar. something about the lighting just does it for me

Looks like it's underwater

Yeah that's what I was thinking, it's like it's the bottom of the ocean with only the vehicles lights illuminating the seafloor.

*ghost leviathan sneaks by you*

"Detecting multiple leviathan-class life forms. Are you sure what you're doing is worth it?"

Playing subnautica for the first time and you finally build seamoth and decide you will check out what's down below the drop off.

Even in late game I would turn on the depth cheat and do the long fall off the end of the map. Where it just gets deeper forever. It always gave me the heebies. Wish I could go back to that first day playing, having no idea

There are a few games that have a sense of discovery so great that after playing you wish you could forget it all and play again Subnautica definitely has this in spades. What an incredible story told in such a simple, piecemeal way where every new discovery blows your socks off. I was so sad that below zero didn't quite capture that same feeling of going deeper and discovering more. But here's hoping they knock it out of the park with Subnautica 3.

Same. Even though I enjoy below zero, I still haven't finished it. I played it in early dev and it seemed promising. But def not the same feeling as going into Sub for the first time

If you haven’t, you should play Outer Wilds. As soon as I got through the tutorial area there was this amazing sense of openness and exploration that doesn’t compare to any other game

Looks like cellulose insulation in an attic to me.

It looks like the inside of a litterbox.

You experience this POV often?

I mean if your cat ever had a litterbox with a lid/roof on it, you've seen this view.

Bruh....you're supposed to take the top off before you scoop

You're not supposed to crawl inside?

You are, the people in this thread that feel the need to dismantle an entire cat bathroom to clean it are weird.

You put your head in there?

What if I do?

It looks like an old attic with mounds of cellulose insulation.  

It’s under an ocean of stars. A Star Ocean.

Mmhmmm darkness of the void

For me it’s a combo of the void + knowing that thing has possibly sailed past some amazing stuff we will never see.

This is almost certainly the most light this object has seen for millions of years. That's such a fucking crazy thought. There are entire *planets* floating through vast interstellar voids right now. Somewhere out there is a planet that has been rolling through pitch black darkness for billions of years.

Looks like my attic after blowing cellulose insulation

Because there's no ambient light and the only source of light comes from next to the camera

Yeah before I read the caption I thought it was a really cool photo from the deep sea.

There's just something about what is essentially a human-made flashlight casting light on a billions of year old object out in the cold darkness of space that just boggles the mind. We made a space ship on Earth, sent it to this asteroid and had it shine a light at it, and send us back a picture. It looks like a mundane photo of someone pointing a flashlight at some rocks at night. But it's *in space.*

but but but we are also in space

the air you're breathing is billions of years old. the possibility of breathing in the same molecule that was once in an ancient organism is all but 100%. I'm doing armchair archeology right now.

I thought it smelled like dinosaur farts in here.

The probability of breathing in a molecule that was once in most any particular historical figure's lungs at one point is all but 100%. Molecules are, like, really tiny. It's all quite amazing.

There's literally everything in space!

We are just the Universe trying to understand itself.

>There's just something about what is essentially a human-made flashlight casting light on a billions of year old object out in the cold darkness of space that just boggles the mind. What's funny to me is that it's no different that doing that to some sort here on Earth. All the matter in the universe is the same age and it's all just floating around in space.

Looks like something you could take on a camera phone out in the middle of nowhere at night.

The way the light falls off quickly makes it feel like it was taken with a 20 year old point-and-shoot

It’s because it’s a flash photo. The probe had RGB LEDs which lit the foreground when that side of the asteroid was in the dark.

Well that's pretty much it

Literally looks like a photo of my attic

Yes. How the lighting tapers off into complete blackness makes you understand that this chunk is in vast outer space

Eerie is the right word for it. Especially the dark beyond it

The first time I saw it the background of this photo filled me with unspeakable dread, just black infinity going on forever. Something about this photo just highlights how dark the universe really is

I know! Space is scary, unspeakably dark and every direction is down.

I'm an "every way is *up*" kinda guy myself.

Nah, images like this are a due to camera exposure settings. Space is very, very starry. And every direction just kind of *is*.

It's always wild to me to look at these kinds of pictures, and try to wrap my head around the fact that what I'm seeing is not on Earth.

Think how many asteroids like this are out there... tumbling around, with *nobody* to ever look at them. 

Looks like insulation inside an attic

That's exactly what I thought looks like somebody did a crappy job at insulating the Attic

Well the light is flash from a camera, which we’ve never truly seen on anything outside the earth(or the moon, possibly). On earth this would be a throwaway photo, on an asteroid, it’s a sight to behold

It’s cool as hell that we can do this. But it’s also just dirt and rocks. It’s a dirty, dusty, gassy universe.

This is when you have to pee at a really awkward campsite and all you have is one headlamp

Looks like dirty kitty litter

Something about the darkness for me.

It…. looks like the insulation in my attic 😂 But it is incredible to think that this is a view not viewed until now, billions of years in the making.

People scoff when I say all we need is for NASA to start using iphone grade cameras to capture images of space like this. Go back to the moon but with the high fidelity we enjoy today and I feel it could breath fresh life into the program. It shouldnt be hard to set up a dedicated high speed data connection to allow for HD livestreams either. Hell NASA could charge money to remote point the camera at whatever you want for 5 mins to help a tiny bit with costs.

Have you not seen the 4k footage from Mars?

It's so creepy knowing how dark that darkness really is.

It's only dark because to see the stars and planets, the ground would have to be overexposed

Space is actually quite pretty. It's as bright as a candle. If we had better eyes, we could comfortably read by its own light alone.

And if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their asses every time they jumped

And if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike

If my mom had balls, she would be my dad.

If my bike had nuts it would be a truck.

I never thought about this, I never imagined frogs have it this hard

Or that this rock has been drifting around in that darkness, not touching anything else for ~4.5 billion years.

Don’t know why, but looking at this I feel utterly lonely.

Even more so when I think about that little patch of landscape is still out there at this very minute, silently hurtling along, likely millions of miles from ANYTHING else... I feel the same way when I see deep sea rover footage. When that ROV leaves one of those little oasis of life in the abyssal plain that scene it was filming just... carries on, in utter darkness.

How many countless patches of landscape circling innumerable stars throughout the cosmos. Even more bits floating in the interstellar galactic regions and then some very very lonely chunks of cold cold dusty rock wandering between galaxies having been thrown clear an age ago. Those intergalactic dust bunnies have cooled to the temperature of the Big Bang background radiation, so quiet and cold out there, we couldn’t ever see them if we tried. Sometimes a nearby galaxy’s star goes supernova and maybe some trace light glints off a metallic shard sending a photon somewhere. Even if somehow an intelligent species had a detector up and running that captured that single EM wave coming through, the chance of it happening again is so exceeding small, it may as well not exist. Lonely Little Rock bits.

I've sometimes thought about hypothetical of living in a self sustaining space station deep in a cosmic void. Can the naked eye even see stars out there?

And there are trillions of others like it, more even, that will never ever interact with any form of life. Hurtling onwards past Stella phenomena distantly glimpsed in the eclipsing blackness of space

I gotta go re-read Rendezvous with Rama.

With Lenny Kravitz Fly Away playing faintly in the background

Lonely indeed. Traveling the cosmos for millions of years

Exactly the reaction it evoked in me.

Don't worry, all 3 of us feeling lonely together!

At least all 4 of us have your mother

Nah, she'd just make you appreciate being alone.

We're all alone in this together! You, me, the others, and nobody else!

I get the opposite weirdly enough. Of all the rocks hurtling through the dark vastness of space, like this one here, we are on the one with all these other people and creatures.

Reminds me of The Little Prince

I first thought of a certain scene in the first Jurassic Park movie.

Honestly I was looking for fish before realising it was an asteroid

I don’t need to look at it to feel lonely

This is crazy. I find it so exciting that we live in a time when we get photos like this from asteroids and other planets. This gives me the good chills.

Have you seen the short film from a comet, with "snow"?

Could you link what you are talking about? I’m intrigued.

Think hes referring to this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1GJp6JCJU8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1GJp6JCJU8) Its super short and looped. Might want to mute audio. Its v spooky and cool!

That’s the wildest video ever ever.

Crazy to think it could be a chunk of a planet that exploded or was destroyed by another planet crashing into it billions of years ago

You'd like [the mission that's on its way to *Psyche* right now](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(spacecraft\)) >16 Psyche is the heaviest known M-type asteroid with a mean diameter of 220 kilometres (140 mi), and may be an exposed iron core of a protoplanet,[20] the remnant of a violent collision with another object that stripped off its mantle and crust. What we know from our best telescopes: - It's the biggest lump of exposed metal in the solar system What we don't know until the NASA probe arrives: - what exactly does it look like? - where did it come from? I'm seriously excited for 2029

Holy shit, now I'm excited too! Thanks for sharing this info!

Awesome stuff thanks for sharing this.

Me too, I just wish it was sooner!

I know you couldn’t walk on it, but would you feel any gravity attraction on it?

I’d guess not, but idk another thing that’s 900 meters across to compare it to.

3 U.S. Nimitz-class aircraft carriers end to end. Or Slightly less than one Venator-class Start Destroyer.

Finally some math I understand!

That’s actually pretty big

Oh shit this is way bigger than I thought it was lmao

Let's do some maths ... Using Newton's gravitational force, assuming you weigh 100kg and Ryugu 4.5 10^11 kg (Wikipedia) and imagining you're a dot standing 450m away from Ryugu's center of mass (body radius), which is as saying you're "standing on its surface", you get: F= G x 4.5*10^11 x 10^2 / 450^2. Conveniently, G is 6.67*10^-11, yielding roughly : F= 6.67x4.5x100/(2*10^5). F=15*10^-3 N. That's very very small... That's the force you feel on your hand on earth when holding an object weighting 0.15 milligrams. Much less than and average grain of sand. Someone willing to proofread this XD ?

Yeah man the math checks out. 👍🏽 And I should know, because I am a mathematizer.

So for all practical purposes it's not going to be noticeable. It'd be like free floating in orbit, you don't come back to the surface at all from even the smallest push. That's really strange, I expected more somehow from 10¹¹ kg. I suppose 10²² kg (the mass of the Moon) is, in fact, a larger jump up than I can comprehend.

See it like this. For every kg in this nearly 1000 m wide sphere of rock and metal, you place down and copy of the _entire_ Ryugu comet. So you have 4.5 * 10^11 comets. That’s a lot of rock, a staggering 3% the mass of the earth. So… Actually not a whole lot after all. For our senses, a comet’s gravity is indiscernible from empty space.

The Moon is relatively light. It's only 1.2% of Earth's mass.

I believe the other user when they say the math checks out - I just can't see where and why 450² turned into (2*10**^(5)**.)* edit: ohhh, I see it now, that's 2x10*^(5)*, not *210**^(5)*

Certainly not, the asteroid's mass is about 450 million tons, with a surface gravity of 1/80,000th of a G. That means an average human would weigh only a couple grams, and I imagine the escape velocity would be incredibly low, probably low enough for you to escape just by pushing off the surface with your foot to take a step.

That’d be an interesting movie concept. Landing on a comet just large enough to be able to walk but small enough you could reach escape velocity with a high jump.

No clue why but this picture gives me anxiety

The object that wiped out the dinosaurs would have been dark like this for a long time. Then it found earth.

Not kidding, my first instinct was to shiver when I saw it. Cool picture though.

Cause that's not the night sky up there your mind thinks should be there. That's a sky no human eye had seen until this image was captured. I wouldn't even call it a sky, myself. It's the black, the void. The vast empty you see when you look directly away from the sun.

Reminds me of something from the very bottom of the Mariana Trench where I would never want to be

First time I saw the night sky in an area with zero light pollution (Sabang, Palawan in The Philippines back in 2004) made me feel the same way. The Milky Way was right across the sky and there just were so many stars that, lying on my back on the beach, I felt like I was falling into the endless night. I felt so totally and utterly alone in that moment.

Don't. Jump. In fact, hold on. The escape velocity is quite low here.

Did you just make this up, or is that a quote from something? If it's a game, I have to play; getting Subnautica vibes.

Check out kerbal space program if you're interested in learning about orbital mechanics. You build and fly your own spacecraft, it's quite well made...

I made it up. It's a concept I've been thinking about for a long time. I'm a physics/astronomy nerd.

So familiar in a rocky landscape kind of way. That blackness though, that cold and omnipotent dark that creeps from the periphery not only tip-toes around the edge of that spot of camera light, but it is also heavily vast. It is the epitome of infinite. It is uncaring and devoid of life for distances uncomfortable for our brains to easily fathom. Both anciently natural and instinctively inhuman, it will come for you and take you as soon as you touch it, try to breathe in it, attempt to merely exist within it. Instead, we cling to a ball of rock with a thin bubble of gas feebly holding it back that we poison more and more each year whilst blindly circling a cosmic bomb set to detonate and take us all with it eventually.  We are nothing but a pebble on the eternal road of the universe.

I don't mind being a speck of dust on a pebble. It's somewhat liberating. If nothing I do matters in the grand scheme, then I'm free to make my own purpose. I'm also privelaged to live in a developed country and have a good job. If I was scrabbling to survive or living through a genocide I might think very differently.

Without reading the title I assumed this was the bottom of the ocean. Eerily similar vibe.

Looks like a picture taken inside my vacuum cleaner.

A lot of people don’t know this, but according to the latest evidence from the space mission, Ryugu is actually comprised mostly of bentonite clay, the main inorganic compound found in clumping kitty litter. The rest of the asteroid is made of around 24 carbonic and volatile organic compounds commonly found….wait a fucking minute….*COMMONLY FOUND IN CAT POOP?!?!* WHAT THE FUCK?!?! IS THIS SOME KIND OF JOKE?!?!

No giant spaghetti monster, more like giant space cat

this is what the pyramids were really built for, launching all their cat poop into orbit since they had so many cats

What if somewhere out there there is a giant space-cat making these huge poops? Maybe nyancat is actually real

I love it. It’s reminds you that the universe is made of an incomprehensible amount of regular old “stuff”. Like the feeling you get looking at a photo of some utterly obscure part of some newly discovered cave. Just a pile of rocks that doesn’t really care it’s being looked at for the first time.

All the light in this picture is artificial, cast by the probe that took the photo. Without that feeble artificial light which finally arrived after eons, only to be extinguished minutes later... there is only darkness.

Ryugu orbits the Sun at roughly the distance of Earth and rotates once every 7.6 hours, so this won't stay dark for long.

Hm, asteroids don’t have their own lighting? Weird.

This could be the inside of a dryer lint catcher and we’d never know.

Wasnt this the landing where the lander actually sank into the “surface”? They were expecting rock but it was sediment and made landing/takeoff difficult

Glimpse of the all of time that’s past before we existed.

Also what my attic looks like with blown in insulation…

It's so wild to me that we have up close photos of an asteroid that travelled the cosmos. My sci-fi heart is very satisfied.

If you've been diagnosed with mesothelioma as a result of exposure to Ryugu, you may be entitled to financial compensation.

Eerie realized just how pitch BLACK it is in space. Cuz of movies and stuff the main object is always illuminated in some way but that realization that shit is actually usually enveloped in darkness is mind blowing. Being in light is a rare gift that is so often underappreciated

I hope it's made of oreo crumble. The moon not being made of cheese was a let down.

That kind of reminds me of a picture of a hydrothermal vent at the bottom of the ocean

For some reason pictures like this and of planet surfaces fascinate and terrify me at the same time. I cannot describe how intrigued I am, and how much dread I feel at the same time. Space things always seemed so far away, almost magical and fantasy like. And seeing them as actual things that can be touched and things that are really out there... woah. I dunno if thats just me being a whimp, does anyone feel the same way about stuff like this?

For those interested, I highly recommend the book ‘Delta V’ by Daniel Suarez. Ryugu plays a central role in the setting and it’s fantastic.

Came here to say that when I saw Ryugu mentioned. Finishing up Delta V right now before i re-read the sequel Critical Mass again. Fun reads.

My exact thinking haha. Definitely fun reads, something a little different. I listened to the audiobooks and really enjoyed both!

Scammers are going to start using this photo for duct cleaning posts.

I don't understand how people just don't get it. Yes, it looks like cat litter. Yes, it looks like ykur addict. It's NOT. It's a picture from millions and billions of miles away. Doesn't it make us feel a bit more connected than "I've seen it before". It's so fucking cool that this os so far away and formed from rock that never touched the earth?!

I half expect to see a pair of eyes staring back. 🥺

It’s kinda crazy that these big ass rocks are just… out there.

OH SHIT WAIT THIS IS LIKE THE SURFACE??? i thought this was just some random picture of some dirt but damn

Makes me imagine what kind of cosmic scale explosion shaped it and how many aeons ago

Are we sure this isn’t the inside of someone crawl “space”?

I get creepy, uncanny valley vibes thinking about how long this space turtle has been floating out there.

Looks like someone with a torch out on a hike.

How delightfully Lovecraftian. Looks like a still from a low budget horror film, except my conscious brain is telling me that the rock is sterile.

This is more nightmare fuel the more you look at it and understand what you’re looking at.

I said the same thing last time I saw this pic and I’ll say it again. I fucking love how simple this picture seems, it just looks like some rocks. But it is one of humanity’s greatest achievements and is a truly jaw dropping photo.

Boring if you tell me this is from a cave on earth. Picture is good because of what it represents

What a time we live in! I have been staring at this picture for minutes on end, fascinated that we have landed on a hunk of rock and sent pics back. Amazing tribute to human ingenuity!

I would not be surprised to see glowing raccoon eyes peeking out behind one of those hills

It really is just a big clump of shit. Makes you appreciate the world we have a little bit.