Slashdot Mirror
Earth Acquires a Quasi-Moon
richard_za writes "Earth has acquired a so called quasi-moon, an asteroid: 2003 YN1, which will encircle us for the next couple of years while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path. Full story on News24. It was found by team led by Paul Chodas, an asteroid specialist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. An orbit simulation can be seen in this Java applet."
Here's a link to Discovery Channel's coverage without the need for registration.
Mike
"That's no Moon!"
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
... which will encircle us for the next couple of ears...
I'm unfamiliar with this unit of measurement.
Have you no remorse? It's one thing to slashdot a web page, but java? You can't rightly do that!
Yeah I know, it's a joke. The class is just like any other static file.
Earth has acquired a so called quasi-moon, an asteroid: 2003 YN1, which will encircle us for the next couple of ears .
And exactly whose ears are we going to sacrifice to the asteroid god in order to have it here in our presence?
Despite the warnings about only 2-body maths being used in the applet, it's too tempting not to run it forwards and backwards a bit just to see... It turns out the closest approach would have been roughly a week before it was noticed on Dec 8th 2003, at 0.0455 AU or ~6,807,000 km. A fair old distance :-)
:-)
I guess it's not too often you get your own asteroid orbiting, but this is still going to be a looong way away for a lot of the time. Maybe when it does get close though, we can send something up to it - beats the hell out of going out to the Oort cloud, even if you do find a few planets along the way
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
What sort of eclipse can we expect from this? To experience a solar eclipse from a temporary sattelite would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Here's the screenshot:
.
O o
Sun:earth:new "moon"
Not to scale. All rights reserved.
If it's orbiting the sun, then how can it be called "our" moon? Just because it's vaguely in our vicinity?
And this is a dupe from 4 years ago.
Earth's Second Moon 2nd Moon Orbiting Earth Discovered
Not even a little evil?
QUASI-evil?
The Diet Coke of evil?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I only have two, so I can only help so much.
"Hex, Bugs, and Rockn'Roll"
Would those be the final front-ears?
You must think in Russian.
I'm a clownfish... I know funny!
Actually we had a new moon last weekend. It happens every 28 days...
"..while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path..."
If only Isac Newton knew this...
...you insensitive clod....
I have misplaced my pants.
he'll know what to do
Neo: "There is no Moon."
"...this is a Moon!"
(shudders) Now dealing with mental image of naked Australian backsides...
This is where the serious fun begins.
There is an entire branch of astronomy that uses distributed observations to map the size and shapes of asteroids using occultations (eclipses with distant stars). When an asteroid passes in front a distant star, the star winks out and then reappears. Knowing the duration (start and stop times) of the occultation, the location of the observer, and the orbits of the Erath and asteroid lets people estimate the size and shape of the asteroid. International Occultation and Timing Association collects data from telescopes around the world (many in the hands of hobbyists) and uses the data to make these estimates.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
You just HAD to put the link in the description.....poor server. Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load. NEO Home Page
A single voice cried out in horror, and was suddenly silenced.
This is the third asteroid we've found which has an orbit tied loosely to that of the Earth. The others are 3753 Cruithne and 2002 AA29. You can see pictures and applets and read about these other bodies at Paul Wiegert's web site:
http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~wiegert/
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
It will be the first time I ever saw this.
They're here to put the kibash on any more plans for Mars.
"...it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path."
It sticks itself in reverse to avoid making a complete loop.
But how can this be a moon of Earth if it orbits THE SUN?
No sig for you!!
I wanted to call it "George" but the teenager in the house has christened it "Foof." (Two o's, like "moon". Her 1st draft was naturally scatological.) C'mon /.ers, let's come up with a name!
If a horse had dropped on him we wouldn't have to take calculus classes...
Also the first thing I thought of. Why the Hell not? How much delta-v would it take to push it into a stable orbit. Sounds like a better use of $$ than a lunar base. At least a lunar base as a jumping off point for Mars. This thing (or Cruithne) seem destined to become space stations at some point - why not now?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
Let's name it Wormwood! Give the religious folk a hell of a time.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
it's orbiting the sun, very close to our own path
Flamebait, yes. Correct? Certainly.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
Let me go find that quatrain. I'm sure there was something about millions dead and nuclear winter and slashdotting the original site...
Aussie: That ain't a planet, this IS a planet.
Bart: That no planet, thats a quasi moon.
Aussie: Alright alright, I see you've played planetry quasi moony before then.
Jonathanjk.com
Damn. What's up with all these asteroids in the last several years? There's been several close passes by these things. Is the asteroid belt giving throwing these things?
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load.
=
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to slashdot.org
Can't we all just take turns?
*DrugCheese rants*
Two drunks are walking along. One drunk says to the other, "What a beautiful night, look at the moon." The other drunk stops and looks at his drunk friend. "You're wrong, that's not the moon, that's the sun." They began to argue when they come upon another drunk. They asked, "Sir, could you please help settle our argument? Tell us what that thing is up in the sky that's shining. Is it the moon or the sun?" The third drunk looked at the sky and said, "Sorry, I don't live around here."
Hey, let's change orbit of that thing and have another space station
Interesting idea, but we have no idea of what the consequences are of rearranging the momenta of the solar system, or any other "environmental" impacts. How would you make such a decision without adequate knowledge of the impacts?
(Turns out that this body is scheduled to intercept an Asteroid, but because we messed with it, Bruce Willis dies in Armageddon).
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
According to the article, the magnitude is around 24. The best the human eye can see is about magnitude 5 given excellent conditions.
:
It is essentially invisible unless you have a decent research telescope.
More info on the astronomical magnitude scale can be found here
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/icq/MagScale.html
With the discovery of this new moon, I'm offering you the opportunity to get in on the action! Just like the original moon, you can now own your own section of the new moon.
It looks like the folks at Quizno's have already setup a web page to pay homage to this new "moon" of ours.
Here's your report card:
(X) confrontational attitude
(X) can recognize something neat
( ) reading skills
(X) enjoys cool applets
What I want to know, is why isn't anyone pushing to steer these NEO rocks into one of the Lagrange points [http://www.physics.montana.edu/faculty/cornish/la grange.html] and construct a REAL space habitat instead of sending a man to Mars or establishing a "permanent" lunar base? It would be pretty cheap to do so, as the technology to build robots to do the grunt work is pretty much within our grasp now. Having sufficient bulk would make for a decent radiation shield, and even a micro-gravity environment is preferable to the zero-G of the ISS, as dust+debris are more readily managed.
There are at least 3 known small (a few kilometers in diameter) rocks that are close enough to send out a robot "tug" with a large amount of propellant, some good-sized solar arrays (or a nuclear battery) to power an ion drive. All the tug needs to do is match orbits with the asteroid, position itself, make contact and gently push it in the right direction. It would take a long time to put the asteroid into one of the L4/L5 points, but as tugs expire, new ones can be sent (or send additional tugs to speed up the process) at a very minimal cost, with a very simple trade-off of time vs money.
I would expect that by the time we get multiple asteroids in close proximity to each other in one of the stable Lagrange points, we would be able to send much more capable robotic workers to either tie the asteroids together with titanium I-beams, or better yet, tether them together with carbon fiber cables and put some spin on the assemblage to keep them under tension. Initially, we could construct living spaces inside the rocks, but as capabilities increase, and more material is placed into the mix, it would be possible to create a poor man's RingWorld with considerable acreage. It's a great place to harvest solar power, base elaborate interplanetary communications facilities and astronomical observatories.
The costs of maintaining an effort like this are very small, and it has the benefit of collecting wandering rocks that might one day drop in on us and put them to good use. Far better than programs to blow them up with nukes, and Bruce Willis won't be around to save us forever.
I knew a clownfish. You, sir, are no clownfish.
i nominate H. Ross. Perot. The astroid gods would be very pleased with such a large pair of ears.
I was looking at the orbits of Pluto and Neptune on the applet, and noticed that Pluto is shown as inside Neptunes orbit at present and until 2011, but I was under the impression that Pluto was once again the farthest planet, as of 1999, and wouldn't pass in again until 2226. So I'm not sure their orbits are correct....
P.S. Don't tell bush, but I think there may be oil up there and I would like to avoid invasion for now.
That really is my homepage, no kidding.
Well, we tend to view the solar system with a staionary sun, not a stationary Earth. The path that the moon takes around the sun from this perspective is relatively close to an eliptical orbit, with a variation back and forth across the Earth's orbital path.
Viewing the sun as staionary, the moon doesn't really go around the Earth, it just passes back and forth across it's path.
I have misplaced my pants.
Go get some nice asian girl to give you a Hong Kong massage.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke
"How much delta-v would it take to push it into a stable orbit."
Probably just enough to trigger the "No nukes in space!" protesters.
attempt no landing here.
the slashdot effect:
Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load.
sig(h)
Because of the Lagrange point physics, the relative velocity of those objects (compared to whatever you are building there) will be very small. It should not be an issue to set up a solar array to power laser micro-meteorite defenses (not to blow the the debris out of the sky, just to push it out of the way), possibly use a COIL laser untill the solar power is up. The next step might be to set up a very large solar-powered laser for planetary asteroid defense.
, 12 543,473579,00.html
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviation/article/0
1. When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend.
2. Do not eat iPod shuffle.
Interesting idea, but we have no idea of what the consequences are of rearranging the momenta of the solar system, or any other "environmental" impacts. How would you make such a decision without adequate knowledge of the impacts?
If moving one tiny asteroid would bring any harm whatsoever, then the solarsystem would have been destroyed long ago. Shoemaker levy 9, the meteors that have hit the earth (think of all those craters), the moon, mars. Saying that moving this thing would upset the balance of the solarsystem would be like saying spraying a sing dandelion is going to cease oxygen production on this planet entirely.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
When the fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha measured the Harvard Bridge in Boston with the body of MIT freshman Oliver Smoot, the length was determined to be 'exactly 364.4 Smoots plus or minus an ear'. Obviously they know what's going on.
It's not so much delta-v that would be a problem, as much as the reaction mass that would be the problem. m1*v1=m2*v2. The asteroid must weigh several thousand metreic tons at least. The amount of reaction mass necessary to change a 1 metric ton mass by 1 meter/second is 3.33 miligrams, assuming we shot those miligrams off at the speed of light. We are talking thousands of tons of asteroid and a much less efficient engine. Until we get nuclear rockets and a space elevator up, it probably wouldn't be economical. Unless we could use its (ralatively) close aproach to mars in 2015 to swing it around to the earth.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Well, when you go for a jog, I will concede that you are orbiting the Earth and not the sun.
I have misplaced my pants.
"while it orbits the sun on a horse-shoe shaped path"
Uh, wouldn't it be easier to fly an elliptical orbit?
IANARS (I Am Not A Rocket Scientist), but from playing with the Java applet, it appears that 2003YN1 is going to come surprisingly close to Earth within the next decade.
In January of 2007, for instance, the asteroid will be trailing Earth by about 0.5 AU. In November of 2020, Earth will be trailing the asteroid by a hair's breadth (in cosmic terms) of 0.1 AU.
Now, four light-minutes (or even 0.75 light-minutes) isn't exactly spitting distance, but how often do we have asteroids within such close proximity to Earth, in such convenient orbits? I imagine it would be fairly cheap to launch a probe to match orbits with the asteroid, rendezvous with it and do some science. A return mission in 2020 would be a distinct possibility (if it were useful, which I'm not sure it would be).
Now, the budgetary and planning requirements for a 2007 mission are probably unmanageable at this late date, especially given NASA's (or ESA's) current budgets. But we've got 16 years to plan for a 2020 mission. What manner of experiments might we be able to devise in the intervening years? What possibilities can you think of?
1) Establish an unmanned observatory on the asteroid
2) Land a power source and construct a propulsion system (using a linear accelerator to eject the asteroid's own mass?) and try to change the asteroid's orbit. Depending on the composition of that baby, it might be worth a pretty penny if we could put it into near Earth orbit for mining.
3) Same as #2, only turn the asteroid into a long-term habitat. Free giant space station, anyone?
OK, so these ideas are a bit far-fetched, possibly venturing into the realm of science fiction. But dreams have to start somewhere...
Yeah? Well Finnegans Wake isn't a much better configuration, so there!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We seem to be having trouble & high failure rates with just sending tiny robotic probes to Mars, and we can hardly even keep a couple of rusty buckets in low earth orbit operating. Moving a small asteroid gently (maybe using solar sails) should be well within our technological capabilities, but it doesn't seem like we have our act together enough to do it.
Right now, the US, one of the richest nations, doesn't even seem to be able to pay for health care or secondary education, but we are willing to pay hundreds of billions to have our shoes x-rayed in order to guard against an infinitesimal chance of getting killed by terrorists. So, you see, the problems aren't technical, they are psychological, social, and political.
(Besides, you really don't want the "oh, that was kilometers" kinds of errors with such a project.)
Sorry this is a little off-topic, but I just thought I'd say that I don't seem to be able to get access to any nasa.gov sites at the moment. All of them are giving me a DNS error. Frustrating, since we've had a couple of interesting NASA related stories today.
I'm wondering if other people are having similar problems.
The simulator link is incorrect. It points to 2004 YN1. The correct link. For a good view in the simulator, tilt the 3D view to straight down, center on earth and zoom in all the way.
New Scientist has an interesting article in their latest issue.
For a more technical explanation, read the paper presented at the Lunary Planetary Science Conference last week.
With a little more specificity, if this object is m=24, then it's about (24-7)=17 magnitudes fainter than the *best* that the human eye can do. To put that into perspective, given that five magnitudes of difference is about 100x difference in actual brightness (~2.5^5), a difference of 17 magnitudes is *roughly* 5.8E6 (2.5^17) times fainter than the human eye is capable seeing in optimal, dark-sky conditions.
Also, see: International Dark-Sky Association
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
The picture on the Discovery Channel coverage is not the asteroid in question. I know this means I need to get out more, but I instantly recognized that picture as 243 Ida and its tiny satellite Dactyl.
Ydco co
The moon is bright over Lebanon tonight! The Lebanese moon looks down shim! sham! shikam!!! Cattle Explodes! Cow shrapnel drips off a tree cascades into a mothers tear. Poor little boy who goes into battle and comes back dead or worse comes back a man. Why don't you warn them moon? Why don't you say duck or scram? But the moon will not. The moon just sits there grinning like a corpse at a Dean Martin roast. What are you laughing at moon? Why don't you share it with the whole class moon? The moon laughs knowingly, the moon laughs, the moon, the.
What if said backside belonged to Nichole Kidman, or Elle Macpherson?
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
why not build a device that mines the surface of the asteriod for reaction mass? Not convert to fuel (mebbe use solar power to run the launcher) and launch pellets from the surfact of the asteriod? Then you would decrease the mass of the asteroid (hopefully only slightly) while using chunks of the asteroid itself as a means to push it in the right direction? Yes it is crude, but perhaps a crude brute force solution would work better than trying to cram enough reaction mass into a rocket device from earth
Once you get to the asteroid, there is plenty of reaction mass available. Just throw off some of the asteroid itself, at high speed.
You've described the mass driver, the standard asteroid/ore moving workhorse of the O'Neill/L5 space colonization effort.
It works like this: picture a bucket on a recirculating rail. The rail is pretty long, hundreds of feet at least. The bucket meglevs along the rail.
There would be at least three railguns on the asteroid, pointing away from the asteroid in opposing directions. Actual orientation is not that important, what is important is that the rails point away.
In operation, the "bucket" stops at a point along the rail on the surface of the asteroid. Some mechanism plonks a pound or so of rock into the bucket. The bucket locks the material down.
The bucket now electromagnetically moves away to the railgun run. On reaching it, it accelerates. At an approprate time, it releases the payload. The bucket slows down, and returns to the loading point.
The process changes the the path of both the payload (reaction mass) and to the asteroid itself. Repeat this process millions of times, and you alter the asteroid's orbit.
The beauty part of a mass driver is that it has no moving parts in contact. You just need something to shovel in the reaction mass, and electricity to run the linear accelerators.
Asteroids can be moved in this manner. Rockets won't hack it, nor ion engines, nor nuclear explosions. Lack of control, or raw power.
We could shape the orbits of these Earth grazers to bring them a little closer to home so that we can exploit them for raw materials to build habitats, build ships, build elevators.
Space elevator projects require a large mass at the opposite end of the tether from the surface to anchor the cable. Asteroids have been suggested for the necessary mass. Mass drivers are the way to go if you want to get that mass.
Oh no, don't tell me that I will have to listen to PMS symptoms twice a month now....
Well, we could deploy a combination of a solar-powered ion-thruster and a mass driver, or we could rig up a solar sail and try and tack the asteroid into position. I imagine if we can slow down its relative velocity, we can let the Sun do the rest of the work. If we can put it into the right trajectory, we can work off a lot of the kinetic energy through gravity transfers. Besides, we don't need this asteroid in orbit overnight - as long as we change its course to orbit the Sun and keep it within accessible range, we can move it closer later with better technology.
I don't know if this is reasonable, but a solar sail might be an acceptable source of thrust to alter the orbit.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"That's no moon! That's battle station!" And it definitely belongs to us, you insensitive clod! You, for one, will welcome us as your new alien overlords!
There you are, staring at me again.
Will our quasi-president announce a quasi-mission to land on this quasi-moon?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
What kind of horse wears elliptical shoes?
coz it is close to us
we like the moooon!
but not as much as a spoon
cuz thats more use for eating soup
Thank you and a fork isnt very useful for that
unless it has got many vegetables
and then you might be better off with a
chop-stick
unlike the moon
it is up in the sky
its up there very high
but not as high
as maybe
digibles or zeppelins
or lightbulbs
and maybe clouds
and puffins also I think maybe
they go quite high too
maybe not as high as the moon
coz the moon is very high
we like the moon
the moon is very useful everyone
everybody like the moon
because it light up the sky at night
and it lovely
and it makes the tide go and we like it
but not as much as cheese
we really like cheese
we like zeppelins
we really like them
and we like kelp and we like moose
and we like deer and we like marmots
and we like all the fluffy animals
we really like the moon
Thanks to Leo's Lyrics and Joel and Alex Veitch
these aren't the moons you're looking for.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If moving one tiny asteroid would bring any harm whatsoever, then the solarsystem would have been destroyed long ago.
And yet that's the whole point of the butterfly example and chaos theory. Listing examples of when a move didn't cause harm does not serve as proof that no move will cause harm. You can't prove the null hypothesis.
Here's the fallacy of the assertion, above. Take the case of a revolver. Put one bullet in the 6th position away from indexing under the hammer. Does putting it to your head and pulling the trigger one time without incidence prove that no harm can ever come? Even , two, three, four, or five times?
Just because the number of objects in our solar system is a large finite number and the relative mass of any one is insignificant, doesn't mean you can prove moving a single, specific one has no consequences. Yet, the burden of proof is on those who would advocate change. Good luck proving the null hypothesis.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
Interesting idea, but we have no idea of what the consequences are of rearranging the momenta of the solar system, or any other "environmental" impacts. How would you make such a decision without adequate knowledge of the impacts?
Sure we do. The equations have already been figured out and are available from most university-level physics textbooks. It's not hard to calculate what the impact would be. However, after performing the calculations you'd likely find that the affect on the rest of the solar system to be zero, to any meaningful level of precision. The mass of this asteroid is probably no greater than 10^10 kilograms, based on its size. Wow! That's a lot. But compare this to the Moon, which has a mass of 7 * 10^22 kilograms. This asteroid has a mass of around 0.0000000000001 times that of the Moon. To compare this to the mass of the Earth, add in a couple more zeroes before the 1. Coincidentally, the mass of this asteroid is about the same mass as has entered the Earth's atmosphere (in the form of millions of tiny asteroids, dust particles, etc.) over the last 10,000 years.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
... by moving it to the appropriate Lagrange point and later (when carbon nanotubes can be spun into long enough threads) using it to build our space elevator to the moon.
This is not as crazy as it may seem; it's do-able.
You might want to check out my web site, www.marsfaqs.info, which has a bunch of info on the subject (including what will be the Mars Society FAQ, once I can finally nag Robert Zubrin into approving it.
How To Get Humans To Mars
I wish I could ride on that rocket...
By your reasoning, we shouldn't do anything, ever, because changing anything might cause a chain reaction that eventually destroys the universe.
Take the classic butterfly example. According to chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings can eventually cause a change of weather on a global scale, and "eventually" is much sooner than we would think. Now, say I'm hiking down the trail, and I see a spider web. It's in my way, so I knock it down. (Let the spider build somewhere else.) However, five minutes after I pass, a butterfly flies through the space that was once occupied by the web. That butterfly continues to fly, and as a result (according to chaos theory), there is an additional hurricane in the Carribean that kills several people and destroys hundreds of homes, with property damage, etc.
Or, say, that the butterfly continues to fly, and intstead of causing an additional hurricane, the flapping of its wings prevents a hurricane from reaching land! No homes, lives, or ships are destroyed.
Demonstrably, we cannot predict all of the eventual consequences of our actions. This should give us pause for thought when we begin to exercise new powers whose consequences are insufficiently understood. But that should not keep us from doing something just because it might have disastrous consequences! Walking across the street, in that case, could have disastrous consequences!
In any case, most of the folks here have watched/read too much SF. We all know an action has unpredictable consequences, but those that cannot possibly be evaluated should be ignored, lest the possibility destroy any chance of action at all. Sure, it might be possible to build mass drivers and alter the asteroid's orbit. But those things don't get designed and built overnight, especially not the first time. (SF books don't count.) Also, one has to imagine the massive amount of hardware that would have to be brought up. At this point, despite what Kim Stanley Robinson might have written, we do not have the ability to send robots to an asteroid and have them build everything they need from the raw materials they find. Building such things down here, and then sending them into space to be assembled is probably more than NASA can handle right now, given the current state of budget affairs, orbital shuttle repair research, Mars trips, etc. Nice thought, but we'll need at least 20 years of research before we're really ready for that sort of thing.
Just my 00000010 cents.
Frodo Lives!!
Well, I was refering to Revelations. However, the reference to the Screwtape letters is clever.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
The space.com article mentions that the orbital path of these pseudo moons eventually allows them to escape the gravitational pull of the sun, at which time they presumably bugger off and make themselves a cup of tea.
Looking at the java applet, the orbital path of this thing looks very much like the orbital path of Pluto, only on a smaller scale. Does anyone know if there are any predictions of Pluto heading off for a cuppa in the next few millennia?
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
By your reasoning, we shouldn't do anything, ever
That would be your conclusion, not mine. I'm just advocating that we at least understand the consequences, and take action to deal with them. No different that why we do environmental impact assessments before starting projects today.
We all know an action has unpredictable consequences, but those that cannot possibly be evaluated should be ignored
This has become an excuse to not think things through at all. Consider nuclear technology. The creation of nuclear waste was clearly forseeable, yet we jumped all over it without thought of how to deal with the consequences, and look at the mess we have created. We have thousands of "temporary" burial sites (many of them located on flood plains). Material with 1000 year half-life and no plan to take care of the problem after the 20 years of temporary storage are up. Are you advocating that we should just ignore all that waste and let the spring floods take care of it for us?
Likewise, genetic engineering is going full guns, with no idea on how to undo the consequences of introducing even a single gene to the environment. When we glom onto ideas without 1) analyzing the consequences, and 2) preparing to deal with them, we do so at our own peril. If you are proposing the application of a technology, you need to have done enough research and analysis to be able to predict the consequences, and have a plan to deal with them. Not just "boldly going where no [one] has gone before". And if you are going to do something, you need to know how to undo it as well.
Don't just pull the trigger on our doom, take the money and run, and say "oops" later.
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
Sure we do.
Wouldn't you have to catalog all the objects in the solar system to be able to do that calculation?
Given that we just discovered this, I would claim you don't know all the variables yet (unless you think this is the last undiscovered object in the solar system, galaxy, or universe).
you'd likely find that the affect on the rest of the solar system to be zero, to any meaningful level of precision
Really interested in knowing its impact to the Earth. But my point is you have to do the analysis, first. I mean, putting rockets on the back of the Moon and pushing it into the Earth would also have negligible impact to the solar system, overall. I just don't want to be here on Earth when it lands.
If you haven't bothered to identify all the impacts of moving the object, and don't understand it well enough to know that there are no undesireable impacts, you haven't done your homework. Come back with the proposal after you have. Neat idea, now go work out the details.
Where's the KA-BOOM? There's supposed to be an earth-shattering KA-BOOM. -- Marvin the Martian
to the Engineer, the glass is neither half full nor half empty. Its just two times too big.
I'd say "sign me up for the next manned moon landing mission!!"
This has become an excuse to not think things through at all.
That is regrettable. I, however, do not advocate the use of such an excuse. I fully support, and would require, a complete and impartial examination of any possible consequences to the use of a new technology. However, you can't list "the butterfly effect" as a possible consequence, since that is completely inscrutable. Any disastrous effects that occurred as a result of such chaotic interaction could be as easily triggered by inaction as by action.
In short, do examine all the options. Just don't get paranoid about "what if" scenarios. If you're not blinded by greed, you'll know where to draw the line.
Frodo Lives!!
Wouldn't you have to catalog all the objects in the solar system to be able to do that calculation?
Given that we just discovered this, I would claim you don't know all the variables yet (unless you think this is the last undiscovered object in the solar system, galaxy, or universe).
If you're looking for 100 significant digits of precision, sure. We haven't catalogued all the objects in the Kuiper belt, for example, but the amount of mass of any uncatalogued object out there at that distance is so low and the distance so far that it doesn't meaningfully affect any calculation, such as sending a probe to successfully land on a comet.
Really interested in knowing its impact to the Earth. But my point is you have to do the analysis, first. I mean, putting rockets on the back of the Moon and pushing it into the Earth would also have negligible impact to the solar system, overall. I just don't want to be here on Earth when it lands.
Nobody has suggested crashing anything into the Earth. Nice FUD attempt.
If you haven't bothered to identify all the impacts of moving the object, and don't understand it well enough to know that there are no undesireable impacts, you haven't done your homework. Come back with the proposal after you have. Neat idea, now go work out the details.
I think moving the asteroid into an Earth orbit is a pointless waste of resources. However, the small size of the asteroid isn't going to meaningfully affect anything on Earth except perhaps the superstitious. Remember, the object is *already* moving and will come close to the Earth anyway, as many other smaller and larger objects have and will in the future. Its affect is like farting into a windstorm. You could spend years analyzing the repercussions of *that*, but why?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
This news gave me an idea about providing samples of Martian rock without going into the gravity well of Mars, and I would like you to point out any fallacies in my reasoning.
If the Earth-Moon system has pseudo-satellites, so will Mars. The orbital perturbations by Jupiter will eventually remove them, but on the other hand the vicinity to the asteroid belt will cause many more impacts, creating new pseudosatellites to Mars.
These pieces of martian rock will not be contaminated like the meteorites found in the Antarctic, nor do they require a very complex sample return mission.
Ion engines, or even ordinary chemical engines would be suitable, and there is no need for heat shields, parachutes, or in-situ propellant production. Maybe even a private organization might have the the resources required ?
Yours
Birger Johansson
I've been playing with the applet, and it seems that this quasi-moon will impact at jan. 4th, 2004! The funny thing is, I haven't heard anything on the news...
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