Rock on

Today, the ESA space-probe Rosetta has made a close-ish approach to the asteroid Lutetia, the largest asteroid thus far approached by a (human) spacecraft. There's not much Science to report yet, but I'm sure a fascinating (to me) list of interesting (to me) facts will arise once the science bods have been able to crunch the numbers.  Rosetta has eleven key instruments including MIDAS- Micro-Imaging Dust Analysis System, an atomic force microscope designed to look at well, bits of dust. This is a handy thing for Rosetta to be carrying as its primary mission objective is the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and comets are notorious for spitting out bits of dust, as the regular meteor showers we get to see are a result of the Earth passing through the dusty trails left by various periodic comets.

A dusty rock in space may not seem that remarkable, but here is something that has never been seen before by human eye... okay, technically it got saw by human eye at least as early as 1852 when Hermann Goldschmidt spotted it in his telescope on the balcony of his Paris flat, and technically we're not seeing it now, but a representation of it broadcast by our robot proxy, but it's the next best thing to being there without having to worry about all that inconvenient bone loss, muscle wastage and exposure to solar and cosmic radiation.

To me it's exciting. It's the sort of thing that makes life interesting and worthwhile.