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Easily-Captured Asteroids Identified

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-they're-any-smaller-you-have-to-throw-them-back dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Long overlooked as mere rocky chunks leftover from the formation of the solar system, asteroids have recently gotten a lot more scrutiny as NASA moves forward with plans to capture, tow, and place a small asteroid somewhere near our planet. Two different private space companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, plan to seek out and mine precious metals and water from near-Earth asteroids. Now Adam Mann reports that astronomers have identified 12 candidate Easily Retrievable Objects (EROs) ranging in size from approximately 2 meters to 60 meters in diameter that already come (cosmically) close enough to our planet — close enough that it would take a relatively small push to put them into orbits at Lagrange points near Earth using existing rocket technology. For example, 2006 RH120 could be sent into orbit at L2 by changing its velocity by just 58 meters per second with a single burn on 1 February 2021. Moving one of these EROs would be a 'logical stepping stone towards more ambitious scenarios of asteroid exploration and exploitation, and possibly the easiest feasible attempt for humans to modify the Solar System environment outside of Earth (PDF),' write the authors in Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy. None of the 12 ERO asteroids are new to astronomers; in fact, one of them became briefly famous when it was found to be temporarily orbiting the Earth until 2007. But until now nobody had realized just how easily these bodies could be captured."

4 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Looks like it's time by halltk1983 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Looks like it's time to build a foundry in space so we can begin the construction of satellites, space stations and long range spacecraft with materials readily available in space, so we don't have to keep carting it up there. Between that and robots and assembly machines, we should be able to build out stuff in the next couple decades.

    --
    Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
    1. Re:Looks like it's time by drinkypoo · · Score: 1, Interesting

      What do you propose to build the foundry out of?

      We need to capture one of these objects before we have the material to build the foundry!

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  2. Easily captured... by runeghost · · Score: 3, Interesting

    or easily retargeted to hit DC? How long before the politicians demand trillions on behalf of their owners to protect the U.S. from the "asteroid threat". War on Space, here we come!

  3. Re:Great! by Kookus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's stuff whizzing past us all the time with the gravitational attractive force that these rocks will have. It's not going to impact tidal patterns until we start capturing relatively large objects... like relative to the moon kind of size.

    You know you only have to stand about 6 feet away from somebody to have the same gravitational pull on them as Mars has on you when it's closest to earth?
    Mars already impacts our tidal patterns more than these rocks.