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.
Would those be the final front-ears?
You must think in Russian.
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...
"...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.
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 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!!
It looks like NASA has been Slashdotted
"Orbit diagram page temporarily unavailable due to high server load."
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 me go find that quatrain. I'm sure there was something about millions dead and nuclear winter and slashdotting the original site...
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."
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
What's up is that our telescopes are getting good enough to see those tiny rocks.
Be faithful to your obsessions. Identify them and be faithful to them, let them guide you like a sleepwalker. JG Ballard
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.
Looks like we did slashdot NASA. I wonder if the government will look upon this as a concentrated Denial of Service attack on a government computer... (or rather, a government server) If so... well, see you guys at Guantanamo...
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....
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.)
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.
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.