The Active Asteroid

The Strange Active Asteroid - Eros

For a year the little space ship, NEAR Shoemaker circled the asteroid 433 Eros. It mapped the surface with lasers and analyzed the spectra with reflected cosmic rays. It took 160,000 pictures from all angles and even swooped down close to the ends for high resolution photos. The little bird settled flawlessly onto the surface in the vicinity of the Himeros saddle on February 12, 2001. As it descended it took some remarkable high-resolution photos.

We learned some interesting things about Eros during the year.

1. The asteroid seems to be made of uniform material. It is a solid body, not a pile of space rubble.

2. The surface has ridges and cliffs that imply it is a fractured piece from a larger body.

3. The surface has many large boulders, some of which have flat surfaces. The boulders stick up out of the dust even in areas with few craters.

4. The asteroid has huge amounts of dust (regolith) on its surface - even in areas where there are few visible craters. Some craters are almost completely buried in dust.

5. The gravity of Eros is 1/1000th that of Earth. Despite this minuscule gravity, regolith has slid downhill in many areas - exposing lighter material beneath.

6. In some areas the surface has collapsed like a sinkhole on earth. The regolith has settled into a flat surface like a water pond. The edges of the flat areas have concentric rings like a pond that has gradually dried up. There is no evidence of water. The flat areas look like they formed as the surface collapsed and the dust settled into the sink hole.

7. The last photo just before touch down shows a large rock. The surface on one side of the rock is smooth. Projecting out from one edge of the rock is an area that has a rougher surface. It looks like a dust storm swirled around the boulder leaving a smooth area on one side and a rough area on the other. Two small troughs can be seen in the dust. It appears that the troughs formed as the dust settled down like a sink hole on earth. The rock is about 3 meters in diameter. Notice that the dust is smooth on one side of the rock and rough on the other.

8. About a million large rocks, about the size of a house, are scattered on the surface. Some seem to have split and cracked. In some cases all that is left is a pile of rock debris. On earth rocks can erode from water, wind, frost, and even the roots of plants. On Eros there is the heat of the sun followed by the cold of the shade. Has the temperature extremes caused these rocks to disintegrate?

9. Some craters on Eros have square corners. The Barringer Crater in Arizona has a square rim. If an impact occurs in an area where the underlying rock is already fractured, and if those fractures intersect at large angles, the crater shape is influenced by the underlying faults. The result is square craters.

Eros has large faults, ridges and groves which run around the entire asteroid. How did these cracks and ridges form? Could it be that Eros is a chunk off a larger body - perhaps a planet. If that were true, Eros must represent a horizontal slice from the planet - not a vertical slice. This is because the material on Eros is not segregated into layers of different kinds of rocks. Could it be that Eros is a chip off a large planet?

Scientists attempt to solve these mysteries by proposing various theories. Is it possible Eros is telling us something that is beyond the theories any scientist could imagine? Scientists are trained to NEVER think outside their most basic assumption. But wait a minute, scientist only try to interpret the evidence! FALSE!!! Scientists can only interpret evidence from far away or long ago with their fundamental assumption. Few of them have ever heard of the assumption. It is the assumption that Aristotle invented! Remember a fundamental assumption is a seemingly insignificant idea that controls how you see the evidence.

Many of the great mysteries of the solar system make "more sense" if one could only question the fundamental assumption. Imagine what the solar system would have been like just a few millennia ago if the fundamental assumption were false.

1. The ancient solar system would have been much smaller. The sun would have been smaller and so would the Earth. Planets would have passed each other at close range just like the ancients said. Great catastrophes could have altered the entire solar system, not just a single planet, just like the ancients implied in their stories.

2. The continents would have been closer together and the seas narrower.

3. Great dinosaurs ran at high speed across the earth.If the same dinosaurs were on earth today they would be so heavy that they could probably not even stand up. Huge Peterosaurs like Quetzalcoatlus, as big as a light airplane, could have soared high above the fern tree forests. Huge insects flew on Earth. It is difficult to imagine that insects with wings like a hawk could possibly have flown, but there they are in the fossils.

4. The ancient people could have lived extremely long lives - just like the "myths" said they did.

5. The ancients could have built megalithic structures like the pyramids with ease.

What if the assumption were false, yet we used it as the foundation for how we interpret physical reality?

1. Cosmologists would invent incredible mathematical myths about black holes, dark matter, a big bang and billions of years. All of these mysteries could be answered (not mathematically solved) by throwing out the fundamental assumption. Remember the assumption is not based on any evidence - just an untested idea.

2. The continents on earth which have drifted apart, would not fit together if the drift could be reversed. (Check this out on a globe - they do not fit even at the continental shelves).

3. Archaeologists could date human artifacts from a cave as hundreds of thousands of years apart, even though they came from a single campfire.

All of these things could be true if the fundamental assumption is false. The Western mind is so locked into this idea they cannot imagine the universe apart from the assumption. In fact the first thing that a Western person asks is, "Do atoms change? Does time change? Does gravity change?" Of course those are the wrong questions to ask! The fundamental assumption is more fundamental than, "What changed?" Think about that little rock Eros. Does the geology of Eros, like so much of the solar system imply that the fundamental assumption is false?

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