Japanese Asteroid Bomb

Today from APNews,

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s space agency said an explosive dropped Friday from its Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully blasted the surface of an asteroid for the first time to form a crater and pave the way for the collection of underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.

Prediction: they won't find what they are looking for.

This is an easy prediction, since every probe sent to comets or asteroids yields results that surprise scientists. Domain knowledge is hardly necessary; just bet against their expectations by default. The pattern is routine. In the short-term aftermath of a mission's results, mission leaders express sentiments that the collected evidence should compel scientists to question basic assumptions about planetary science, go back to the drawing board, and so on. In the long term, that never happens. The inconvenient evidence is downplayed and explained away. In fact, this same mission has already disappointed scientists once, and that reporting is itself an example of the process in action.

Two weeks ago, CNN ran the headline Japan asteroid probe in 'tantalizing' solar system discoveries.

"It's far dryer than we expected, and given Ryugu is quite young (by asteroid standards) at around 100 million years old, this suggests its parent body was much largely devoid of water too," Sugita added.

The finding is significant, he said, because of all of Earth's water is thought to have come came from local asteroids, distant comets and the nebula or dust cloud that became our sun.

"The presence of dry asteroids in the asteroid belt would change models used to describe the chemical composition of the early solar system," he added.

Amusingly, that was not CNN's original headline. The first headline, as seen cached here, was Hayabusa 2 data forces scientists to reevaluate early solar system. The scenario is most likely the routine one. The reporters expressed the sentiments of the mission leaders, then received pushback from the wider scientific community - who don't like being forced to reevaluate anything - and the headline was modified. One of these days, we should create a catalogue of all the instances where missions have returned results that challenged fundamental assumptions of the standard models, but then no fundamental changes to models are ever made. It's academic fraud! They launch the missions at great public expense, but then ignore the results that they don't like...which is most of them.

At stake is the astrophysicists' standard model of the solar system lifecycle, which depends on gravitational accretion disk theory. We've picked on accretion disks here before, although not nearly enough. It's one of their only tricks, so they use it for everything. The planets were said to have coalesced out of a dusty accretion disk that surrounded the primordial sun. Supernovae are theorized to be driven by accretion that pushes a star to critical mass for fusionable material. Most amusing, quasars - the brightest objects of the sky - are said to be glowing accretion disks powered by supermassive black holes...allegedly the most anti-bright objects of the sky.

Asteroids and comets are thought to be leftovers of the primordial accretion disk, and thus something of a time capsule for scientists to peer into. Their model of planetary birth suggests Earth would have been too hot to condense the liquid water that covers most of its surface. Thus, they reckon water must have come from asteroids and other objects that formed further out from the sun, and then bombarded the Earth later after it had cooled enough.

Their theory predicts that the asteroids which still exist should contain significant amounts of water. They found the asteroid to be surprisingly dry (which isn't surprising) so now they suggest that the asteroid was dried out by eons of bombardment by solar and cosmic radiation. The core of the asteroids should be intact, though, so they are now blasting craters into asteroids to see. The question isn't whether they will find the water they are looking for, but how they will respond when they don't. We'll likely hear excuses like the crater wasn't deep enough, drying by radiation was stronger than expected, etc. They might make some minor tweaks to planetary formation models, but the major premises will not be challenged. While an interesting mission from an engineering angle (and well done, it seems), the Hyabusa2 will ultimately be a complete waste of $148 million in Japanese taxes (16.4 billion yen) because scientists ignore mission results they don't like.