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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."
... and send the comet crashing into the earth, Lori Petty will rescue Naomi Watts, and they will fight against Malcolm McDowell and save us all from Water and Power!
I think I need to turn off the TV and go outside now...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
one foot is 0.3049m
Comets coming from the Oort cloud contain the least contaminated matter from the start of the solar system. Exploring and sampling material from them actually answer a wide variety of questions including matters about the origin of life. Finding amino acids in the sample would imply that life on Earth was not self-generating.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
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
Yes. Centripetal force. The Earth is constantly changing direction (as it orbits), which means its velocity (speed with direction) is constantly changing. Change in velocity / time = acceleration. The direction of acceleraton is towards the sun.
It's called gravity.
If we weren't accelerating, we'd be going in a straight line. Acceleration is a change in velocity, velocity is speed AND direction, so a change in direction counts. I.e. a circular orbit requires constant acceleration.
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
"Rosetta will inspect two asteroids (Otawara and Siwa) at close quarters."
It's about time that us humans started doing the probing to the aliens!
Second chance for any Heaven's Gate folks that got left behind!
The coolest voice ever.
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.
Last time people tried to meet up with a comet, they ended up dead, and covered with purple cloth.
The US space program doesn't look a lot better: a reusable launch vehicle that is more expensive per launch than disposable launch vehicles, two shuttles that have blown up, Mars probes that just disappear, and on and on.
Over the last couple of decades, the European space program doesn't seem to have screwed up any more than the US space program. OTOH, it seems to be a bit more cost-effective and fewer people die in it.
Your favorite
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?
That is pretty old-fashioned. Today, they use an explosive grenade that explodes on impact. The explosion either knocks the asteroid unconsious or kills it. Then, NASA can pull it into Earth and fire a frickin' laser beam into it to make sure it's dead.
Asteroid conservation organisations are against the harpooning, but have no tangible arguments left. Since asteroids are extremely numerous, and modern catch methods are within animal welfare standards, the conservationists now claim that asteroids have intrinsic rights, Asteroid Rights. Namely:
The right to have their orbital characteristics un-affected other bodies.
The right not to be used as hiding places for space ships or telepaths.
The right to not be blasted by Star Destroyers.
The right to control their own resources, and grant their own mining rights to whoever they choose.
When pressed on who should represent the asteroids and work as mining rights proxies, the conservation organisations said "us".
Suddenly, most space mining companies had changed their status to non-profit organisations.
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
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).