This is an image that was taken on an asteroid

https://i.redd.it/5hlez9sdsm5g1.jpeg

34 Comments

  1. It’s so…exotic and also mundane. Like I can imagine what it feels like, yet know what/where/how far away it is.

  2. DeliciousPumpkinPie on

    Really makes it clear why they refer to these types of asteroids as “rubble piles.”

  3. It is *still* so weird to me how dusty/poofy a lot of asteroids are. There’s dirt in them thar orbits!

  4. As suspected… it WAS a rock! Can’t to find out what’s in it, saw Mark Kelly talking about sugars in a recent interview.

  5. Imagine being a pebble on that asteroid, holding on for dear life because if you ever get detached you’ll probably be alone for a very, very long time

  6. Crazy to also think if we ever managed to take a photo from a planet outside the solar system, it’s probably going to look pretty much exactly like this one too

  7. TurtleFisher54 on

    This is just a reminder that the most interesting place in the universe is most likely right where we are

  8. Looking forward to the psyche probe arrival. It will probably also look like just a rubble pile, but you never know. Could have a bit of variation on its surface.

  9. I’ve written about this image before but it gives me such an intense feeling of wonder crossed with dread.

    This lifeless clump of rocky material flung from some distant region of space, floating interminably around for millions or billions of years… it’s an object, but it’s also a place. A place of total silence and desolation, and countless such examples litter the cosmos. They’re in our solar system, in our galaxy, beyond our galaxy. Quintillions of little islands of lifeless nothingness bobbing around in a black ocean so vast that we’re elementary particles by comparison.

    Sometimes I can almost hold all of these thoughts at once in my mind and I feel overwhelmed. It’s like I get this millisecond where I can feel the totality of everything in existence, the reality of it all existing out there as real as this moment, and it overwhelms me, makes me feel stuck, tiny, confused, dismayed, stunned, in awe.

    We’re microorganisms clinging to a tiny piece of debris that’s floating in the interstitial voids of our galaxy, which is itself just another grain of sand. It’s incomprehensible, like truly something I feel the human mind didn’t evolve a capacity to grasp, and yet we know it to be a fact.