They sent up a space thingy. Seven years ago. To travel about 2 billion miles out to deep space. And these are proper miles, not those silly ones my electric car uses which are (sometimes) only about 300 yards long. The space thingy would have been travelling at approximately 27,000 miles per hour. That is fairly fast. Sound travels at 761mph. So if you happened to see the space thing coming towards you as you sat on some distant satellite, you quite literally would not hear it coming. Well you would, but about 10 minutes after it went past. And it was going out to meet an asteroid called Bennu . Which is about half a kilometre in diameter. Oh, that’s nice, we’ll meet in space and have a coffee. Must be a Starbucks up there, surely? But no. Asteroids don’t sit still, it’s not in their nature. It’s revolving around some orbit somewhere and in fact in about 20-eighty-something, it might even crash into our planet!! Holy shit. Last time that happened the dinosaurs were made extinct, and that crash wasn’t as big as this one will be.

But it’s not really about that. They wanted to collect as ‘sample’. They sent it a little glass vial with ‘piss in this’ but it didn’t respond. So they sent the thingy. To ‘meet’ it. So let’s just ponder this ‘meeting’ for a moment. Because the asteroid is moving on its orbit, probably about the same speed as our thingy. So you have to work out, seven years ago, where that asteroid will be in seven years time, and arrange for a space vehicle, travelling at 27,000mph, to meet it precisely and exactly, to such a degree that the space pod ‘brushes’ against the asteroid collecting a sample. How hard can that be?

Then there’s the even bigger question of ‘why’. Or even ‘why the fuck would you do that???’ Go all that way to come back with 250grams of rock and dust. They could have come round to me on a Sunday when I’m gardening and taken all they want. I’d have paid them, in fact. But no, they wanted asteroid rock and dust. And who can blame them?

It then had to be ‘slowed down’ as it approached Utah from space at 27,000mph. Otherwise, really, all that work would have been scattered for 100 miles into the porridge of a lot of unhappy Mormons. The parachute worked and it hit the ground at just 11mph, itself totally amazing.

They reckon that Bannu is about 6 billion years old. Before the Earth was even formed. So they want to analyse its composition and learn where it’s been, what’s happened, HOW THE WORLD AND LIFE UPON IT STARTED!!! All from 250 grams of shit that you’d throw away if you found it.

Ok, and also, how it might be destroyed, averted, steered away or put off its course should it come too close in twenty-eighty-whatever.

And if you think that’s impressive, you should have seen Spurs at Arsenal yesterday. That was impressive.

Happy Yom Kippur

A xxxx