https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

>When compared to steel in a strength-to-weight ratio, titanium is far superior, as it is as strong as steel but 45% lighter. In fact, titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all known metals.

There's a reason cherry picked titanium. :)

Edit: "Based on the speed of the meteor and how much of the object burned upon entry, Loeb determined that it must be made of a material that is tougher than iron."

Yup.

"There's a chance its not iron but something new!"

"What chance is that?"

"Its inverse to the chance we told our funders, who gave us millions to collect it with a magnet, that it was iron."

"So its pretty guaranteed its iron"

"Yup".

"Aren't your funders concerned you are saying it could be something different than iron?"

"You see the name of the university and a few corporations on the ship? Would you be talking to us if we were just getting a run of the mill iron metorite?"

If it's an extra hard iron alloy it would be more interesting because they can analyze it and perhaps reproduce the composition and perhaps the heat process that created the meteorite.

If they want mass extraction after that, then potentially a form a dredging could be used (vacuum and filter could work to leave the sand and silt on the bottom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer

It seems like they must still be assuming it's largely made of Iron.

But with proper equipment you can detect non magnetic conductive materials. Not sure what's it called, but if you pass a magnet near eg. copper the magnetic force from the magnet will induce electricity on copper which in turn with also produce a slight magnetic field. There are many good YouTube videos on this topic and they're quite cool! (https://youtu.be/u7Rg0TcHQ4Y)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferromagnetism#Ferromagnetic_m...

But the "tougher than iron" part? Based just on how much material was lost during atmospheric entry, as reported by sensors not really designed for that purpose? That's a tough pill to swallow. It would be really interesting to hear more about how much this asteroid differed from others measured by the same equipment.

Lede is an american thing. Parent could have been a british or canadian neighbour with their british colourful spelling.

Huh.

"lead" in this context is pronounced led not leed

(Lead makes you dumb)

On the other hand, English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, so both spellings might as well be equally correct.

On the third hand, they're both wrong if we want to get old school about it; no sense in catering to a bunch of French invaders when we have the perfectly good words "blee" and "hue".