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First Asteroid Discovered At Uranus's Leading Trojan Point
LeadSongDog writes "Space.com is reporting on a 60km comet-like body in Lagrangian orbit around the Sun, locked to Uranus's leading Trojan Point. This means a distant, but fairly accessible supply of water-ice, hence: reaction mass, hydrogen and oxygen for robotic miners if we can just get them there with an energy source. 'The sun and Earth have two Trojan points, one leading ahead of Earth, known as the L-4 point of the system, and one trailing behind, its L-5 point. The sun and other planets have Lagrangian points also, with asteroids seen at those the sun shares with Jupiter, Neptune and Mars. Scientists thought the Trojan points of Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, were too unstable to host asteroids."
pls
That headline caused the heads of many a troll to explode.
...if Uranus has asteroids. He can give you some cream for it.
Smivs on the intertubes!
If so, they should name the asteroid hamster.
someone forgot to wipe!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Someone has to change that planet's name ASAP.
Neil deGrasse Tyson are you listening?
MC Hammer memorial headline
Anyone trying to troll that headline is going to come up looking lame.
"Uranus" and "trojan" jokes. This is what Slashdot has become.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
What the point of a trojan leading asteroids into Urectum is, I am not sure, but it sounds like...
"Dammit Jim, I'm a physician, not your proctologist."
Silence is a state of mime.
The trojan points are only meta-stable anyway. So for people to say that they thought the leading trojan point of Uranus was too unstable to capture an asteroid isn't thinking clearly. When was it captured? Last year? When will it leave the trojan point? In two weeks? They need to think about what "stable" and "unstable" mean in cosmological time. It can be unstable but still last in that configuration well past the time you and I die.
The reputation of that planet is so damaged that I actually chewed out my daughter for "getting stuck with" Uranus. "But it was such a pretty blue", the naive little grade-schooler said.
"Next time don't dilly-dally and get in line early and pick a real planet, so that your family won't be embarrassed, you got that?"
"Yes, Daddy. Next time I'll pick Pluto....."
Table-ized A.I.
Ceres is a dwarf planet that makes up about 1/3rd the mass of the asteroid belt. It's thought to be made of rock and ice as well. So, it would have RAW materials for both building and fueling... If you don't mind all the other rocks whizzing by. Closer proximity to the sun means it's faster to use solar to split H2O closer in.
Amazing to think of a future where fuel could be made at such sites (even out of water on the moon) and then distributed to other orbits about the solar system to fuel up on in transit. The biggest benefit of finding caches of resources like this is that they've got a much lower gravity tax...
Uranu's trojan asteroid would be sort of like a gas station in the middle of no-where: "Slow down, pilgrim. Sun's not so bright you hafta scurry about. Time moves a bit slower for us robotic refuelers out here in the land of the midday night. One wrong move and it's 2.6 billion clicks to the nearest part store."
So I checked the invariance of your Lagrangian. Hubba-hubba.
Does that mean that Uranus has not "cleared its orbit" of other objects? (That being one of the IAU's criteria for planet-hood)
There has to be a Trojan condom joke in there somewhere. Maybe somebody can mine Uranus for it.
You're right that's how I ended up with two kids.
'Uranus' and 'Trojan Point'? Not that there's anything wrong with that....
I expect an "off-topic" rating on this post, but it seems like the whole population of Slashdot has (appropriately) used up their mod points marking things negatively in this thread. Props to you, moderators.
It seems as if all of the Solar System's planets are obeying the universal law of gravity, with the arguable exception of Mercury and Venus. And for them (and outer dwarf planets too), the increasing complication of small spaces and/ or multiple bodies messing up relationships make it unsurprising that Trojans are rare and temporary enough to not have been found.
It's nice work, but hardly earth-shattering. Not even Uranus-shattering.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
the technical term for when you drop the soap in the shower?