Asteroid's got a Moon

Here's the asteroid "Ida" (31K diameter) with its very own moon, Dactyl (1.4K diameter). Coming at ya live!

That Ida has a cute little moon gives scientists reason to believe many/most larger asteroids have moons as well, since, as the idea goes, debris is scattered around the asteroids often enough, and it's more than likely some of this debris will form an orbit, at least for awhile.
Here's tiny Dactyl, cutest li'l baby moon of Sol's System!

Once again, just for perspective, there's more accessible metals and precious stuff like gold on rocks like Dactyl than ever dug up on Earth, for all of time. Just waiting for us out there. Or, conversely, on an eventual collision course. Either way, we're rich!

Sky's not the Limit

Click for big - Asteroid mining as a maybe real thing by some rich dudes who've started a company. If you're super rich, why not? And if the crazy idea actually works, well, then you might become the richest men who've ever walked this precious metal barren planet. Richer than Crassus.

For you see, Earth differentiated - meaning, it melted. And most of the heavy stuff sank down deep into the planet. Far from our machines. And so we simply scrape around the surface - all the gold, silver, tin, iron, etc ever dug up but a pittance of what actually exists on Earth. But we'll never be able to get to it.

And so, space. Most of the time asteroids did not differentiate, and thus the precious metals are sitting in discrete chunks close to the surface. Some asteroids are almost entirely iron. More metal than mankind has ever know sits in just one or two 500M asteroid. Read this if you can:

I'll summarize the entire idea (which will eventually happen if we continue to advance as a technological species): 1. Find some good target asteroids. There are two general classes - water rich, and metal rich. 2. Get to them, and drag them to a Lagrange point. 3. There, mine them of water and metals. 4. Send some of the metal back to Earth for a very large price. Use the rest to build your space mining infrastructure to you can mine ever more asteroids.

Soon enough with this scheme and we'll have entered some post-scarcity wonder world of flying cars and giant space stations.

Also too: Underground cities in case some mad Gazillionaire decides to rain asteroids down upon the planet.

Titanomachia

Titan (and Mimas - the Death Star moon)! Second biggest moon in the Solar System, and maybe first in our hearts (tough choices). It is one of two moons with an atmosphere, and a very thick one at that. Nitrogen based, like Earth's. However, Earth has no views like this:

An excellent art piece as well. For reference, Titan is bigger than Mercury, and far more interesting, though that's an opinion I suppose. What Titan tells us - and all the other cool moons, but especially Titan - is that moons can be quite diverse, and that large planets can have quite many of them, acting like mini "solar" systems. Saturn to date has a confirmed 62 moons, with more likely to come. More art:

I can't tell you all their names correctly, except Titan at center, occulted. Each moon can exert a gravitational influence on the other moons, and I'm sure one day we'll discover a moon with a moon. It will be cool. For now, appreciate Titan:

False color Titan pics showing the changing cloud formations. It rains on Titan. There's lakes:

More false color. "False color" means scientists have assigned colors to the image based on the data at hand. It's accurate for what it is, but also subjective to a degree, though also close enough. For the record, just about any cool color space shot you've seen is false color to some degree. Here's the real deal:

More lakes! The fishin' ain't so good though, one assumes. As the liquid on Titan is methane, and the mountains and valleys and boulders and rocks are ice. Wicked hard ice - the temp on the surface is around -200 degrees Celsius. Cold as heck. It is truly an alien world, but oh so familiar:

Titan seas, with islands. One day our robot children will vacation on the shores of Methane Sea.

Rivers of methane emptying into methane seas. It's like Earth, but will never be like Earth. Titan is highly inhospitable to us, and so it will be left to the robots. Check out this amazing pic:

The surface of Titan, as seen by Huygens - a probe shot from Cassini during its early years. Another feather in the cap of this amazing science mission. Those are little pebbles of ice. Rounded from some type of erosion, be it liquid or wind. Titan has all the weather we have on Earth, except it's methane raining down from the orange clouds. So cool.

Is there life? Seems hard to imagine, but every year we find life on Earth in the strangest of places - super heated volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean; 6 miles below ground deep in the bedrock; way, way high in the sky, floating bacteria living forever in the clouds. Life is everywhere on Earth, and it seems it has always been so - evidence of life now goes back to just a few hundred million years after the creation of Earth as we know it - which is not the original Earth, not by many iterations.

Perhaps some form of life similar to life on Earth exists on Titan. Or perhaps a life unlike life on Earth exists on Titan. Or, more likely, life does not exist on Titan, at least not on the surface. It is possible Titan has a vast underground ocean of warm liquid water, and imagine what kind of sealife might evolve there. Gnarly stuff, like everything in the ocean. One day we'll find out - we need to send out the bots in our name.

Elemental Art

Thin slices of a meteorite, seen through different filters. Or a Warhol piece or knock off. Either way, I'd hang it on my wall. Fun gift idea - framed science pics! Astronomy! Genes! Microscopes! There's a lot of beautiful images. Like this one:

Call me an enormous nerd, sure, but the Periodic Table is a thing of beauty. Its elegance is stunning, and the meaning behind it is profound. The numbers on each element represent the number of protons in the atom's nucleus, and thus also the number of electrons orbiting the nucleus. Dig it: Each new row represents a new electron shell - the orbital paths of the electrons. Hydrogen and Helium have one. Lithium and all the elements in row two have two, Sodium's row has three, and so on. The columns are called Groups and each column has the same number of electrons in its outermost shell, giving each element in the column similar properties, despite the difference in number of electrons. For it is true! All matter is made up of elements - you, me, the tree, the oceans, the Earth, the Sun, all the stars, the vast clouds of gas spanning hundreds of light years, and so on - all just collections of elements. And each element is an atom that becomes the thing we know as Gold or Silver or Oxygen simply based on its number of protons and electrons. Hydrogen has 1 electron, Helium 2, Lithium 3, Iron 26, and so on. And thus our reality is fashioned. It's incredible! And all presented cleanly here in this awesome chart. Awesome work, Dmitri Mendleev!

Bonus element pic:

Earth and our Moon as seen from Mercury. All but vast collections of different elements bound together by gravity.