Aye robot

Hunting Dagger

Dated: second half of the 19th century

Culture: Georgian

Measurements: overall length 43.9 cm

The hilt of European form comes with flattened-cylindrical pommel and small, recurved, double guard in brass, engraved with tigers and its prey. It has bone grips and an elaborately-profiled tangband, the straight, heavy, double-edged blade showing traces of wootz forging, with pronounced central ridge, chiseled in three panels with tigers among vines, each on a gilded ground.

The Asteroids in our Neighborhood

Check out this video from Scott Manley, tracing thirty years of asteroid discovery and the deployment of new and more sensitive instruments to find them. From the green main belt asteroids, to the yellow dots that cross Venus’ orbit, to the red that come near our own orbit … space has a lot of stuff in it. Nearly 600,000 objects known at the latest update.

But that doesn’t mean we’re in any special danger. As these objects, most very tiny, travel through their wonky, often angled orbits, they travel through a volume of 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic km, or enough to fit a trillion Earths. Space may have a lot of stuff in it, but it’s also very big.