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Easily-Captured Asteroids Identified
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."
It doesn't have to hit Earth to affect it. Consider the tides. Our global eco system has evolved to expect tides. It would be difficult if not impossible to predict the full extent of the harm that could result if tidal patterns are altered. All sorts of life could flourish or die under such changes.
I'm not exactly a tree-hugger, but I certainly appreciate the factors and influences over life on this planet. This would affect the oceans in all sorts of ways. That which affects the oceans and the life within them will affect us and possibly even global weather patterns.
Because a 2~60m diameter stone in space can significantly alter tides.
It doesn't have to hit Earth to affect it. Consider the tides.
Why not consider the Lily? Look, the largest of these objects is sixty meters in diameter. I'm math-challenged, but a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation reveals marinara sauce and a little olive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
If only we had a large mass of material anywhere close by...
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.
It doesn't have to hit Earth to affect it. Consider the tides. Our global eco system has evolved to expect tides. It would be difficult if not impossible to predict the full extent of the harm that could result if tidal patterns are altered. All sorts of life could flourish or die under such changes.
I'm not exactly a tree-hugger, but I certainly appreciate the factors and influences over life on this planet. This would affect the oceans in all sorts of ways. That which affects the oceans and the life within them will affect us and possibly even global weather patterns.
Because a 2~60m diameter stone in space can significantly alter tides.
The level of numerical illiteracy* of the general public (i.e. the GP) is appalling, and combined with the boatloads of self-esteem fed to them during school years, it resulted in people worse than being totally ignorant.
A totally ignorant person would either ask the above question without assumption, e.g. "Is it possible for the captured asteroid to affect the Earth in any meaningful way?", or just assume the experts have already thought about it. Only those who knew just enough to be dangerous would both assume their imagination (considerations that is not based on hard facts nor experience is no different than imagining things) is correct, AND the experts have not considered it already.
* - by that, I mean the lack of sense in numerical scales and numbers. The radius of the Moon is in the order of ~1000km, so a 60m asteroid (round to 100m) is 4 orders of magnitude in linear dimension and thus 12 orders of magnitude in volume. How lack of numerical sense do you need to be to think that something 12 orders of magnitude smaller can have any impact?
The problem is the jerk next door who used those initial foundry materials to train combat troops, who come over and take *our* foundry.
I suck at RTS's because I hate them. Or vice versa.