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Mission to Harpoon Comet is Back on Track
An anonymous reader writes "The Rosetta mission planners have announced today that after an indefinite launch delay earlier this year, their goal of landing on a comet is back on track. Their new baseline target is a rendezvous with the comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in November 2014. En route to the comet, Rosetta will inspect two asteroids (Otawara and Siwa) at close quarters."
is the main reason for this project. The "Dirty Snowball" theory of Biological beginnings could be given a comprehensive shot (in the arm or in the head), depending upon the results of this mission.
*sighs*
Only 11 years to wait for the data to come back, we could have been to Mars and back 3 times by then (and I hope we will have)
The sooner we get ourselves (and more importantly, all our heavy, polluting industry) off this planet, the better.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the Rosetta project involve orbiting a satelite around the comet, and not harpooning a comet with a landbased object?
Now that I think about it, how do you "harpoon" an asteroid anyways. Are we going to use a thick rope and a spear? Or is Moby Dicking it the wrong way to go?
Vonal Declosion
You're off by one digit; if you aim for a comet 1 billion miles away, you're going to miss it by 100,000 miles.
Plus, it's not that simple. You have to decide if you're using standard feet (.3048 meter) or U.S. survey feet (0.3048006096012 meter). You might still miss the comet by 600 miles.
Here is a bit of Higher perspective: The US government spends more than 10 times as much money on its military budget than on its science budget. This comet project could tell us important things about genetics, solar interference and mutation, and Evolution. This could lead to radical medical advances.
Maybe the US should do some demilitarisation, because at the moment the US has the largest armed forces proportional to its total population of any country. It is unnecessary.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
If you take this line of reasoning to it's logical conclusion I would expect you to sell your computer tomorrow and send a couple of bucks to the aid agency of your choice. Now *why* don't you do that? Think about it; then scale up 6 orders of magnitude - and there's your answer why we do things like this.
Yes people die. 32000 people die from preventable diseases every day. However, advances in space exploration is an imparative not an option. The ability to colonise the moon, mars, and space, mine comets, and extract resources is what is going to keep the human race around for thousands of years to come. So no, the comet cannot wait.
fewer people die in it.
Maybe because all of their launches have been UNMANNED!!!!
No, I'm in favour of Orbital industry (it makes no sense to put industry at the bottom of a gravity well, when most of where the results of that industry will be needed is in space anyway.
Production of bulk items in space is only economically viable _if_ they are to be used mostly in space. In practice, they'll be used wherever most of the population is. For the forseeable future, this is on earth.
Further, most pollution is from three areas - chemical processing (be it smelting, the plastics industry, or what-have-you), growing crops (fertilizer runoff), and supporting population and industry power consumption (generating electricity, running cars).
If you're planning to move either of the first two into space, you'll have to make them closed-loop processes due to shortage of materials (hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen are hard to come by in the inner solar system; the belt is far enough away to present *serious* transport problems). If you're making these processes closed-loop, you might as well build the same factories on earth, as they will no longer pollute.
The last is tied in considerable part to where your population is (as it's what uses power). That's mostly on earth, due to the difficulty moving the earth's population off-planet.
In summary, unless the population is primarily based in space, I don't believe it would be beneficial to move industry there. Focus on making industry less polluting down here (and on closing the other end of the loop by using landfills as chemical feedstock for manufacturing).