October 23, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts. Note that my commentary about OSIRIS-REx took place before yesterday’s press release which outlined how much they had captured and forced them to cancel the spin maneuver that would have weighed the sample so that they store it as quickly as possible.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Embedded below the fold in two parts. Note that my commentary about OSIRIS-REx took place before yesterday’s press release which outlined how much they had captured and forced them to cancel the spin maneuver that would have weighed the sample so that they store it as quickly as possible.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
If Bennu and Ryugu are rubble piles collected from many asteroids, I think there will be a problem with interpreting the samples. One wouldn’t know where they came from. Just a few meters away the sample might’ve been very different. They might have picked up one piece of gravel that is mostly carbon, another that is mostly silicon and a third that is mostly iron. Where does one go from there?
Meteorites are not that bad. Only their surface has been burned by the friction through the atmosphere, the inner remains untouched. So much so that life could prevail there, safe from the heat and violence outside. The main problem is that one doesn’t know their context, where they came from. And I’m afraid that the two asteroid samples coming home soon won’t be much more helpful because of the character of these two asteroids.
An astronomer said that he got a phone call one day, by a guy who wanted to sell him a meteorite from Venus, That’d be exceptionally interesting! But at first look it turned out to probably be just another one from Vesta and could not have Venusian origin.