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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."
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!
"Uranus" and "trojan" jokes. This is what Slashdot has become.
Slashdot -- Celebrating 16 years of anus jokes
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.
Someone has to change that planet's name ASAP.
Neil deGrasse Tyson are you listening?
It doesn't take an astrophysicist. Caelus is the roman equivalent, and less prone to bevis and butthead tag lines.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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."
Also pretty useless, I suspect. I can't imagine that there are all that many places that we might want to go that meet the criteria of both having Uranus' L4 or L5 point on route and not having a more viable alternative refuelling stop available. Maybe that will change if (and it's a very big "if") we discover that the Kuiper belt is a vast resource of valuable minerals and develop the technology to exploit it, but until then it's just an astronomical curiousity that might provide some useful information on what we can expect to find at more accessible trojan points. I think we'll see a Monolith Burger outlet at the Jovian L4/L5 points long before anything from Earth even visits here.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Does that mean that Uranus has not "cleared its orbit" of other objects? (That being one of the IAU's criteria for planet-hood)
According to Prof. Farnsworth they will have changed its name prior to the year 3000 to 'Urectum'.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8