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Exploring the Asteroids
quakeaddict wrote to us with a cool feature about the upcoming Near Earth Asteroid Rendevzous with Asteroid Eros. It's got a rundown of the schedule of the mission. Hmm...now if they could just work out asteroid mining, we'd be doing fine.
Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.
...
Pisses me off that we've not moved ahead with that, but hey, I guess we have better things to worry about as a species...
Still, these asteroid adventures seem pretty nifty. If only we'd get heavy industry involved in space expansion, and start putting all our massively destructive industrial manufacturing in space or on one of these asteroids, it seems like we might actually make some progress.
I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Good points, all true.
I guess we're just not ready, politically and socially.
Some of us are, probably, but I fear thats only because we're not really facing up to whats in front of us, socially, politically, and technologically, as a species.
I mean, sure, if there were a cheap way to do it I'm sure there'd be a massive exodus to space by those in our society who'd like to do things they can't do on Earth, but that's a long ways off, I'm sure.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That's true, but at 100km altitude, it's still 9.5m/s^2. For back of the envelope calcs, G is basicly constant for that range, so just good old E=mgh is good enough. Hmm, 10kg*100000m*9.65m/s^2 (average accel) gives 9.65MJ. I don't think I want to be hit by that.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Okay, we agree that it isn't worth it to send the shuttle up in space to mine all the gold that is hanging around for the taking in orbit.
Lets change the parameters slightly. You send the shuttle up for some unrelated mission. Repair the hubble or whatever. Now take a day, however much the shuttle can safely get back to earth, and leave. No it isn't profitable on its own. But if you have a payload that will pay for a one way trip, and nothing profitable to take on the return trip, you can still make money with the unprofitable because you have to come back anyway. So long as the cost of one extra day in space (when nothing else is going on, is less then the worth of the gold on earth you come out ahead. So using yourn figgure, the cost to repair the hubble is no longer $500 million, but 500-220 = 280 million dollars. Still a great cost to tax payers, but much less then otherwise.
Of course this ignores the effect on the price of gold. Not that it matters, since there isn't unlimited amounts of gold un orbit just waiting for someone to take.
Ah, yes, asteroid mining. Does any else remember being a kid and thinking, "hey, in 2000, we're sure to have Moon bases and Mars bases and be mining the asteroids and...". And now here it is, the year 2000, and we don't even have a proper space station yet. Little missions like this are fine, but isn't it still terribly disappointing that the space race lost most of its momentum after Apollo?
Oddly enough - during this rather eventful wekk we've had Brian Marsden as a guest at the Observatory. In case you don;t know - Brian is the man in charge of cataloging all the asteroid observations and determining orbits.
He also decides who the discoverer is and therefore who gets naming rights (so of course I spent the whole time being very nice to him in the hope that I'd get an asteroid 'Manley').
Currnetly there are observations of almost 60,000 objects so it's going to become quite difficult to come up with names.
And now NASA is confounding his problem by taking close up photos of Eros - these photos have craters - and there's now a competition to come up with names for the craters.....
ho hum
Russian authorities have tested a reusable space vehicle, at a fraction of the cost of a Shuttle, and the tests were highly successful. The only problem is, they can't find it.
Read the story here.
Finding God in a Dog
by 2000, we'd all have personal jet packs and be wearing silver suits with a black V on the front.
I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed.
This sig is false.
I hate to be an asshole and abuse my +1, but a horrible Java banner appeared ad on slashdot! It was for Jane's IT and wanted you to move a car around or something. I usually browse with junkbuster, but I decided to use a windows box for a few seconds, and this is the shock I get!
Slashdot/Andover gets bought by VA Linux, and a few days later Java banner ads appear. Coincidence? I think not.
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
Even if the stell balls don't have the energy to explode when they impact they do have the energy to go right through most structures. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building would go right through someone's body. It would be for the most part a psychological weapon, a rain of high velocity steel pellets would mutilate a city.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
while controversial because people envision asteroids raining down on us like in so many movies is a very viable solution to the problems of raw resources. Lets saw we push a 500m (thats cubic meters and is pretty small compared to Ceres or Pallas) asteroid into the Earth or Moon's orbit for mining, there are many tons of raw materials just sitting there. Lets say it was a rocky asteroid (95% silicates) it could be ground up and used for any number of materials. Silicon structures (aerogel) are very light and very strong and would be easy to make from raw silicon. An iron cored asteroid would give us oodletons of ultra high quality steel, the metal would form a prime crystalize structure in microgravity and be about 5 times stronger than theb est steel made here on Earth, not to mention its production would be virtually pollution free. Besides raw material a hollowed out asteroid would make a really nice shell for a space station since the layer of rock would absorb a good deal of the solar radiation humans don't particularly like and provide a prefab superstructure. Once the infrastructure for space-mining is in place it will provide a very clean and very profitable business. The Sun spits out plenty of energy to use for smelting, factory power, material reclamation, ect. And for those Deep Impact fearing folk, we could set up specific zones for certain size asteroids, big ones wouldn't be allowed in certain orbits.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Negligible dingleberry, Eros is very large, the probe landing on it it very very very very small by comparison. It will have a similar effect to you headbutting Mt. Everest.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
There's a great article on the hazards of asteroid exploration here
--Shoeboy
or Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A classic space invasion story if there ever was one, and you can always count on Niven for very exact science.
Chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
There was an excellent Wired article about this subject that talks about NEAR's mission director Bob Farquhar, his expertise at using unique orbits to slingshot objects, and his habit of scheduling mission events to coincide with interesting dates.
The rendevous was initially scheduled for a different date. "January 10, 1999, the day the spacecraft was due at Eros, was the fifth anniversary of his civil marriage to his second wife, Irina."
It's a very interesting read!
- StaticLimit
You can see THOR in action in the "David's Sling", along with the first information war. You can buy the book but I noticed a reference that it might have also been in Hypercard. Anyone know more about the electronic form? If I buy a copy, is there a Linux viewer?
I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it would go something like: "And boom, no more balloon" -- by Newton's third law and without an incredible amount of wind resistance (which would be scarce at high altitudes), your high altitude balloon would probably explode from the sudden thrust. So you have one shot, assuming no one shoots your balloon down first.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
"No one has ever orbited a small body in space," he said. "The orbital stability is rather tenuous, and as we travel around Eros our navigation maneuvers must be perfect to keep us from crashing into it."
Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?
The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.
Why such emphasis? What are they trying to hide? Big deal, so Eros isn't an Armor or Apollo asteroid. Hey, wait a second: Apollo + NASA == conspiracy, right? Wait 'til I let my friends in on this one.
On a more serious note, I've been waiting for the NEAR for a couple years now. We know all about the chemical composition of most of our planets, but before now, we never knew as much about asteroids, even though there're so many more of them (and there's a much greater chance that one of them will show up at our front door with a pointy reckoning than there is for something like Venus). A kudos to NASA if they pull this one off. As Congress is currently hammering out the new budget, NASA can't afford to mess this one up.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
distance (in miles)=136000000
distance(in metres)=136000000 * 1609
c=300000000 m/s
=> time (in s) ~= 720
So, this interaction will take place 12 light minutes away. Allowing for errors, let's say 1/2 an hour round-trip time for signals. OK, the orbital time will be pretty low, but it's still a serious challenge.
If they land this thing on, with a signal latency like that, can NASA have their budget back please?
Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick any two.
I don't even want to talk about how far away from Eros I am right now.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Marginally on topic... asteroid mining, elite, frontier, open source, elite open source code... ok give me some points for trying.
For anyone who fondly remembers elite and might not have heard of recent developments.
Frontier developments is now working on Elite 4 and there is a plan to make the full source of the original elite games open in a limited fashion.
see here: http://www.frontier.co.uk/eliteclub.html
Also, the BBC source code was posted unofficially to the net and is available here:
http://home.clara.net/cjpinder/elite.html
Oh yeah, in elite 3 you could go into orbit round asteroids and even land on them.
See it is on topic after all...
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
An object falling to Earth from infinity will be moving quite a bit faster, at a minimum of 7 miles per second. Oh, your math is wrong. At constant acceleration, v^2 = 2*a*d. With v = 8000 m/sec and a = 9.81 m/sec^2, d = 8000^2/(2*9.81) = 3.26e6 meters = 2027 miles. Of course, the acceleration isn't constant, it falls off as the inverse square of distance. Are you up to doing the integral of G*M(earth)/r^2 from r=4000 miles to infinity? You might find it illuminating.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Anyone who is even thinking of mining asteroids has never felt the wrath of Sinistar.
He hungers....
Well, if we are getting technical here then.
"Dropping" it would just put it into Earth orbit as well....
Dang - just when you think your valentine's day couldn't get any worse, you find out that a lifeless asteroid and a hunk of metal with a camera attatched are both getting more action than you are....
Happy 14th to those wacky lovebirds up there!
-Denor
Here's another thing I fear... if, as proposed, they try to come within a mile of the asteroid with NEAR -- something that has never been attempted before -- and they crash, people will again bitch as NASA for failing. *sigh*
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
'Nuff said.
Sorry to disturb the geekstravaganza over "Mining Asteroids" and "Space Living", but someone has to do it.
Problems:
1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.
2) We have most of everything we want on earth. Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly. Some more platinum might be nice because there's not really enough to meet potential demand, but oh well.
3) Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.
4) Where's the fuel going to come from to smelt these bad boys? Certainly we're not going to be hauling ore to and from earth?
5) Anyone who believes significant (100k+) populations will exist off-earth within the next century is delusional. Delusional squared if they think space colonization is a solution to population growth. Period.
6) Why bother? Earth is enormous. Space is difficult to make habitable.
7) There is far more interesting science that can be funded with the cash we blow on NASA Stupid Human Tricks.
8) Sending people to Mars is a pure unadulterated tremendous waste of money. Just like the Space Station under construction. Too bad Texan Congressmen and professional corporate cocksuckers don't agree.
9) Tang sucks. Even the new stuff.
10) I bent my wookie!
Toodles!
-troll taker