Why Does NASA Want To Bring An Asteroid to Earth?
NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit, New Scientist
“Researchers with the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California have confirmed that NASA is mulling over their plan to build a robotic spacecraft to grab a small asteroid and place it in high lunar orbit. The mission would cost about $2.6 billion – slightly more than NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover – and could be completed by the 2020s. .. Robotically bringing an asteroid to the moon instead would be a more attractive first step, the Keck researchers conclude, because an object orbiting the moon would be in easier reach of robotic probes and maybe even humans.”
Keith’s note: This study has not been released yet so we don’t know what is in it. All we hear is how to go get an asteroid and bring it back to Earth – but not why. If the idea is to study an asteroid close up, I would think that you could send a swarm of satellites, large antennas, etc. based on existing hardware to an asteroid and allow high fidelity telepresence capability for the same/less cost and less complexity than using brute force to bring it to Earth. The only possible rationale for bringing an asteroid back to Earth would be to use the materials in it. I have yet to see any mission statement that charters NASA to mine asteroids. Indeed, the White House doesn’t even support the more modest L2 station that Charlie Bolden (sometimes) wants to build using traditional engineering.
The last time I checked, one of the main reasons why the White House tasked NASA to send humans to an asteroid in the first place was to test out long duration deep space human capabilities as a prelude to sending humans to Mars. Bringing their asteroidal destination to Earth sort of defeats that initial intent. Who knows: maybe Charlie Bolden wants to bring Mars closer to Earth to cut down on travel time.
Keith’s update: the original report has indeed been released previously. But the specific mission proposal that NASA has sent to the White House has not been released – nor will it be any time soon since this is all “predecisional” stuff.
Just because there is no mention of NASA mining asteroids in it’s charter does not mean that it cannot use this asteroid to develop new technologies and to encourage commercial activities in space (asteroid mining being the most obvious), which IS in NASA’s charter.
See The national Aeronautcs and Space Act
Sec. 20112 (a)(4)
or
Sec. 20103 (1)(D)
Either one of these could outline this activity.
http://www.nasa.gov/offices…
Please tell me why NASA should spend $2 billion to grab an asteroid for mining by the private sector when the agency cannot even pay the bills for the projects it has already committed to?
As far as my personal opinion goes, I think that expanding humanities economic sphere is more important right now than understanding the age and structure of our universe, and many of the other philisophical questions that many of NASA’s science experiements are purposed for. I also beleive that the taxpayers funding NASA would like to see something more substantial from there investment than a feel good study about the universe and our place in it.
Edit:
To answer you more directly, because NASA should prioritize missions that add substance to the overall lives of man (space mining and the R&D behind) vice outrageuosly expensive science projects such as JWST that bring us nothing more than pretty pictures of far away places and heaps of data and knowledge that only a handful of humans can even grasp.
Keep in mind I DO beleive in these science projects, but that they should not be our top priority at such a critical stage in our effort to develop space.
I think it is a brilliant idea. The government should support future economic expansion into space. Providing an exotic destination with economic potential in cis-Lunar space that can be visited with a lower delta-V than the Moon sounds like a good idea to me. Asteroid X-prize?
So NASA can do it after the projects it has committed to already. Is that the main reason you are against it?
Because the ability to do so needs to be learned/proven, and this capability will be an asset for “all mankind” in the future, including NASA and US tax payers. I would much rather see NASA spending money and other resources to develop capabilities (for all) that will be important in the future than continue (trying) to do yet more of the same things that they’ve been doing for decades. Consider how much excitement (relatively speaking) the Curiousity landing generated; why?; in large part, I think, because it was new; it hadn’t been done before and it was very challenging. Granted, the majority of common people had to be told that it was both never done before and very difficult, but that didn’t lessen the excitement one bit. Several comparable possibilities exist with an asteroid mission, on top of the technical/scientific benefits.
and what if they get their calcs just a little bit wrong ?
sounds like it could be inviting the fox into the hen-house …
Then it crashes into the moon. It will probably crash into the Moon anyways at some point – I’ve read that tiny irregularities in its gravity (caused by particular dense parts of the Moon’s surface) tend to play hell with orbits there anyways.
i’m more worried about it crashing inot the earth.
mind you, asteroid crashes into the moon, destablises it’s orbit, moon crashes into earth …
Don’t worry. Its not going to be iron. They are looking for a 7m diameter carbonaceous one that would burn up in the atmosphere should it even somehow in an unlikely event end up approaching Earth. Be a nice show though.
“asteroid crashes into the moon, destablises it’s orbit, moon crashes into earth”
The asteroid in the plan is 7m across. The moon is 3,500,000 metres across.
Like a sand grain 1/16th inch across hitting a granite hill half a mile high and half a mile wide, and knocking the granite hill towards the next state at over 5,500 mph.
Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck are standing by ….
An ELE can ruin your whole day.
If they get it really, really wrong (like they demonstrate the same ability doing it as, say, you would) then it burns up on Earth’s atmosphere on account of it being tiny. Or, more likely, mises us completely, or hits the moon (as it eventually will without active stationkeeping). So I wouldn’t panic.
The “humans to an asteroid mission” is a pipe dream at this point, although if they can pull a small one into lunar orbit it might not be . . . 10 years down the line, assuming that the funding for heavy lifters doesn’t get killed.
As for Bolden, he wants to look like NASA’s doing something, without it actually doing anything except tread water on the manned program. Which fits with how the current administration views manned spaceflight – they see it as a jobs program that keeps swing state Florida voters and Senators happy.
Keith, you have it all wrong. NASA is now in the movie business (see Michoud Hollywood South). Spielberg wants an asteroid for Space cowboys 2.
Hmm … maybe I could play myself in that movie …
Maybe because the resources on the moon are not the same ones available on an asteroid. You’re comparing apples to oranges here.
A good portionl of the Moon’s surface is made up of meteoric material from asteroid that have hit it.
True. I needed to be more specific in my argument then.
I should have framed it as the asteroids being a concetrated resource, while the meteorite material on the moon is billions of little fragments scattered far and wide mixed with parent moon material. Obviously until a proper analysis is done on the energy expenditure to gather, process, and ship moon materials vice NEO’s this argument is only subjective.
That is what we have found so far but, recent remote sensing offers tantalizing clues to far larger deposits. What we know is that some lunar samples have up to one percent meteoric metal… That is a hell of a lot of metal at the Apollo 16 highlands site.
http://news.harvard.edu/gaz…
” I would think that you could send a swarm of satellites, large antennas, etc. based on existing hardware to an asteroid and allow high fidelity telepresence capability for the same/less cost”
So many things wrong here.
a) Tele-presence only works with a small time lag. NEOs only pass within the Earth-Lunar system for a few hours, and are then gone to inter-planetary distances. If telepresence is gone, you need autonomous operation
b) Autonomous operations don’t exist yet – we can barely do the most simplistic steps on Mars – and nothing like mining an asteroid
c) For comparable capability, you’ll need the ability to pull samples after studying it and return them to Earth. Your “swarm based on existing hardware” might turn out a tad more expensive than you think.
d) Doing it this way is such a giant leap forward – I find it exciting, and would like to see the technologies developed being used later for other missions. Isn’t that the grand plan?
You seem to have missed the rover news from Mars. Mars is much further away than NEOs are.
Actually, not really.
NEOs pass by the earth briefly – the “Near” in “Near Earth Objects” refers to the closest approach distance. Otherwise they orbit the sun along with Earth and Mars, and the distance between them is determined mostly by whether they happen to be on opposite sides of the orbit or not.For telepresence, you need a maximum lag of a few seconds – roughly moon-and-back. You occasionally hear about a NEO passing through the earth-moon system, but the passage takes only a few hours, and happens (per NEO) only once every hundreds of orbits.
For telepresence, you really need a maximum lag of order of the human reaction time, which is 100-200 milliseconds. Anything longer than that will interfere strongly with your sense of “presence”. That’s well understood. Go talk to an online game enthusiast about the dependence of “presence” on communication latency.
For a lunar distance, the two-way time delay of at least 2.6 seconds is such that tasks involving a lot of hand-eye coordination and demanding significant dexterity are really somewhat slow and mentally painful. If you just want to drive a rover, pedal-to-the-metal, out on the flats, it’s somewhat less limiting.
I agree – the “not really” in my comment is referencing the parent post, not your post. (Which appears over mine, even though it was posted later)
With 1-2 seoncds, I was being generous in the context of the wider discussion of doing telepresence operations on a NEO. For true telepresence (“remote control”), as you say, you need very fast response times.
The longer the delay the less you can do, but still if we’re talking about second or two, while it won’t be “realtime”, you can still achieve maybe 100 operations per hour (an operation being (“Command, observe, decide what to do next”) so you can “nudge” your equipment to do what you want. Not nearly as good as driving it directly, but still highly productive.
This is very different from a 30 minute type transmission delay, where you can send a command, and then totally break off your train of thought and get back to what you were doing only an hour later. So for example, If something goes wrong, your equipment will keep making it worse for an hour before you can see the problem and stop what you’re doing.
I think we’re largely in agreement, though I wanted to underscore the difference between supervisory telerobotics and telepresence. Different things entirely. Different mental processing involved. Entirely different sense of “presence”.
But be careful about a few seconds time delay. Lunokhod was a bit more than that, and that simple driving effort was extraordinarily hard and mentally straining. 100 operations per hour is SLOW. It could take several iterations just to reach out and grab something.
But there is no question that the reason that humans at Mars would do things hundreds of times faster than telerobots on Mars is mostly because of exactly one thing. Communication delay. It’s not about robots versus humans. It’s about humans here versus humans there.
I worked with a guy in Laguna Beach in the early 90’s that built a big sand box with several robots that could be operated over the Internet. He had school kids use it and used variable delays, up to an including lunar time lag. After a bit of training, the kids got it just fine.
I agree that we can achieve a lot scientifically with teleoperated sensors, and perhaps teleoperated manipulators, though our efforts on Mars hardly represent what we could call “high fidelity telepresence”. What Cisco does in an office environment with low latency and high bandwidth is high fidelity telepresence. You feel like you’re really there. On Mars, our sophisticated telerobotics allow us to feel like we’re there only by having us see a picture, making some observations with it, and sleeping on it.
What would be done on a NEO, and what is being done on Mars is what is called supervised telerobotics. We should not confuse that with telepresence.
This is addressing the “how”, not the “why”:
The biggest thing we ever returned from an asteroid was a tiny sample capsule. Even a few meters worth of asteroid will weigh many tons, and we’ll need not only to propel it back towards us, but also park it in orbit (aerobraking is not applicable here) – so the total amount of impulse necessary is enormous.
So I’m very curious to hear the details on how this is proposed to be done.
Re parking: What we really mean is putting it into a free fall orbit around the Moon. If the asteroid is not too massive, relative to the Moon, and if we take the entire trip from the incoming encounter point to lunar orbit to slow it down (perhaps over several orbits), I wonder if a braking solar sail will do the job. We don’t actually have to “stop” the thing relative to the Moon. If we bring it in on the right trajectory and slow it down enough that it’s linear momentum is balanced by the Moon’s gravitational pull on it, then it can be captured into orbit in the classical sense. We’d have to have a NEO with a lot of parameters that were just right to even consider this, and I can’t imagine us being that lucky. I can’t think of any other method that doesn’t involve more energy than we can supply out there, unless we’re willing to settle for something really small, or take decades to do it. But I’m glad that learned professionals are now at least thinking about it.
Here’s what I’m thinking:
You can use gravity assist to brake. If you bring an asteroid (or even find one that already does it) so that it comes opposite the moon’s direction of motion around the earth, you will slow it down, and help capture it in a high earth orbit. Since the moon is airless, you can fly very close to it, which I think makes the maneuver more effective. Once in earth orbit, you can take it towards the moon (though why not leave it where it is?)
Since we’re talking about a pretty small rock, btw, it can’t get through the atmosphere and pose a danger to Earth, so this is entirely safe.
Apparently, it’s easier to bring the mountain to Mohammed? i.e., the technical challenge of keeping humans alive in interplanetary space is greater than moving kilotons of rock into orbit?
Think in terms of more simple and immediate needs. Grabbing a NEO and keeping close to home KEEPS it reasonably accessible for a long period of time, as opposed to trying to cram in selected measurements before it’s moving off to the great beyond again in its elliptical orbit. Once you’ve got it locked up in your neighborhood, then yes, NASA can mine it — not for immediate resource acquisition; rather for the simple but essential purpose of learning how to mine an asteroid (of the captured type). We talk casually about this, but it’s never been done, and any procedures and/or equipment that exist for it are completely theoretical, never been tried. You can’t use Earth-based processes for mining an asteroid. Effective and efficient processes for doing so need to be developed and tested, both human-powered and then robotic processes. The ONLY way to learn and prove these processes is to actually do them on an asteroid in space. Although the time for ROI is longer than acceptable for conventional investments, the dollar amount of that ROI, I strongly suspect, potentially will exceed almost any other investment in history.
My tick pilots are ready, to mine NASAs resources to learn what we need to know.
This idea is brilliant. Yes it is expensive and yes it will take money from programs, but it is brilliant. Why?
Let’s say for example one of the asteroids has significant sources of diamond, gold, platinum or silver. I do have firsthand evidence from a recent trip to Russia that these minerals do exist in current asteroids as well as crater sites here on earth, so I’m not just making this up. There was a recently unclassified crater site in Siberia which holds 10 times the worlds known supply of diamonds. The extreme physics elsewhere in the universe make it very possible to make such unique material, and asteroids can serve as a prime transport.
Diamonds and gold, platinum from space could absolutely cripple the blood diamond market, the brutal mineral mining market and DeBeers monopolistic and unjust hold on those resources. Plus, diamond from space may have it’s own appeal for the engagement ring market.
$2 Billion dollars or more is a small price to pay for that economic infusion of competition, let alone the groundbreaking space science.
My reading of the press reports about the Siberian Popigai crater is that the industrial grade diamonds being found there in abundance were likely produced in the impact. The extreme physics of the universe has absolutely nothing to do with them, and the deposit in Siberia hardly suggests that you can mine diamonds in asteroids.
Of course, if that’s the case, we should be investing in exploration of asteroid impact sites, and not asteroids! I suppose someone with a morbid sense of humor could consider dragging an asteroid into cislunar space and then, with just the right push, make a new crater with loads of diamonds! That would cripple a few markets …
Intriguing so I had to look up a few sources on that.
http://www.forbes.com/sites…
“For the value of any mineral deposit is not the value of the minerals in it. It’s the value of those minerals minus
the cost of extracting them. With gemstone diamonds this doesn’t
usually matter: the value is so high that almost any mining technique is
profitable. But these aren’t gemstone diamonds”
“We have an entirely acceptable substitute for natural industrial
diamonds: lab grown industrial diamonds. And we almost always find that
the lab grown ones, the artificial ones, are cheaper than the mined
ones.”
In thinking about this latest idea I have the following thoughts.
This is about the third or fourth or fifth idea floated by administrator Bolden. In doing this, and not having a distinct vision to fight for, Charlie is making the same mistake that NASA made in the late 1960’s. I am currently researching the Apollo applications program and the NASA rational’s associated with their mission at the time. They did something similar, they had a great number of missions that they wanted to do, but did not have a vision (which means sense of purpose) that they were willing to fight for. This is not exactly right in that they were still pretty much following what Von Braun had fought for in the 1950’s but by the late 1960’s his voice had pretty much been silenced. With the silencing of the voice of Von Braun, the plans that NASA had looked like they were throwing a lot of projects at the wall to see which ones would stick, i.e there was no coherency.
Today we have the same problem at NASA. Say what you will about Dr. Griffin, and as most know I have had a lot to say on that subject, but at least he came into NASA with a definite idea of what he wanted to do and how to do it and he took the reins of the agency and steered it in that direction. This is what a leader does. General Bolden by training is a Marine general. In the Marines, they don’t start the wars, they don’t do the strategic thing that is done by the politicians, they just head off and take whatever hill their superiors tell them to take. Unless they have a strategic vision of a Patton, a Nimitz, MacArthur, or Eisenhower, all the know to do is to present a variety of plans and then wait for the politicians to tell them which hill to take.
Unfortunately this is not how politicians work, especially today. NASA needs a leader with a strategic vision of where he or she wants to take the nation in space that they then sell to the president, and then the president gives them the resources to charge forward. Say what you will about Mike Griffin this is exactly what he did. No matter how much we in the community disagreed with him, he knew what he wanted and in the position of power that he had in the agency was able to turn almost the entire apparatus in that direction.
While I would never advocate for Dr. Griffin’s return, we need a NASA administrator with a strategic vision and a single minded will to lead the agency in that direction. If he or she is successful, then the president, congress, and the nation will benefit, if not, then you toss them and find the next person and the next until they get it right……
Getting it right by the way is to focus the agency and the nation on the simple premise that the economic development of the solar system is the core goal of the American space effort and that not only NASA but all of our executive agencies and congressional lawmaking be bent to this task. We are in a terrible time in our nation’s history and we need strategic leadership at the helm of the agency, not a tactician.
Amazing isn’t it that with all these high-ranking Generals and senior execs and “leaders” (I use the term facetiously) that no one has a clue of what direction to head or where to go, let alone being able to clearly and succinctly define how and when. Even Griffin was way off on the cost and time and when it got down to it the details of how to most expeditiously build the hardware. How did we wind up with all these guys leading the way and no one, not even one of the senior “leaders” able to lead the way?
Brian
It’s actually quite easy to understand. “Where there is no vision, the people perish”. I can’t tell you how many times I have read that NASA never recommended any plan to the president or congress for the post Apollo era direction of NASA. However, thanks to some of the people who helped make those plans, I now know differently.
I had a very interesting conversation today with someone who was pretty close to Von Braun. There was an integrated plan laid out in 1969 that covered NASA’s missions stretching from 1970-1990. This plan was clearly laid out an articulated to decision makers. They weren’t interested.
Just four years prior to things were radically different. I also have a copy of the testimony from Webb and Von Braun to the NASA authorizing committee in the Senate for FY-1966. Both of them went into great detail about progress, programs being developed such as the NERVA and NERVA II nuclear engines. NASA was already working on integrating the NERVA flight engine into the development plan for flight on Apollo 20. The design of the VAB was specifically laid out to allow for the handling of the nuclear third stage. All of this was in progress but 1966 was NASA’s last year of full funding.
There was no one cause for NASA’s fall from funding grace but I have a theory that my friend in Huntsville partially confirmed. In the 1950’s Von Braun, working with Walt Disney was the salesman for space in America, showing the vision for the future. By the 1960’s Von Braun no longer had the time to fulfill this role. His public posture outside of the day to day grind at NASA getting the Saturn V ready for launch was almost non existent. I think that Von Braun understood this in that after he left NASA he helped to found the National Space Institute, which later became the National Space Society. The biggest problem there was that the NSI and later the NSS (until recent years) was not much more than a cheerleader for a larger NASA budget.
The country turned on all technocratic R&D projects with the convulsions of the 1960’s. I just read a Village Voice article from 1967 that openly sided with the Viet Cong, long before the Tet offensive of April 1968 that supposedly marked the turning point in public support for the war. There were the riots, the assassinations, the critical riots at the democratic convention in 1968 that were telling as well.
From what I have read, funding for state supported R&D dropped as a proportion of the budget as spending for social programs took off in the late 60’s and early 70’s. If NASA’s funding had kept pace with the plans of Von Braun we would have been on Mars before 1980. Just think how much farther along we would be had the support for space had been sustained.
This echos down to today in that NASA still tries to justify itself scientifically, which was what NASA turned to as a rational in the early 70’s. Science justification only gets you so far and as Paul Spudis has accurately observed, congress and the president is willing to give NASA only so much money, it is their task to figure out how to do exploration within that budget, not to continually push congress to provide more with only the rational of science.
If NASA wants to get the funds they want today, NASA needs to change its internal and external justification. It is not the 1960’s anymore. It is time to reconnect NASA to the American people and the way to do so is through bringing back the R&D, the goals, and the ability of space exploration to make a material contribution to job creation, economic growth, and the creation of new wealth. This is why I use the economic development of the solar system as a meme. If you have that then your vision, your sense of purpose then becomes clear and the missions you fly, with that unifying principle be justified, as long as the are within that context.
Thus, you must ask, does bringing an asteroid into Earth orbit contribute to economic development? I think the answer is at least a qualified yes, but none of this is being spoke about, the vision is not being presented, just a bunch of disconnected missions. I like Elon’s single minded goal to colonize Mars. I support that goal. It is my personal opinion that the industrialization of the Moon is the only thing that makes the colonization of Mars tenable, but I don’t quibble with the goal.
It is all about developing a strategic goal that connects with the needs of the people and then the support will be there.
If the government cannot find the leadership to do this, then we keep replacing them until we do. In the mean time we do what we can in the private sphere to help enable this even if the government never gets its act together….
Does NASA need a plan???
Dr. Griffin took the reins and drove over a cliff.
Where could we find someone with vision and a plan today lololol????
Seems to me people with vision are more useful outside of NASA.
How is that aggressive radiation shielding research program going anyway?????
It is proper to question the value of such a mission. Recall that we have hundreds of tons of asteroids already on Earth as meteorites. What is their economic value? Granted they have high prices as a result of collector demand, but what is their intrinsic worth? That should be answered before making an economic argument for retrieving an asteroid.
My main concern,however, is the practicality of such a mission. We know of no potential targets. Even after we fly the B612 infrared survey mission, we will have found very few if any targets this small. If return to Earth or Moon orbit is the objective, the target will need to be in a nearly Earth-like orbit, and there are very few such, since Earth-like orbits are unstable. If this were a real priority, we would need an entire generation of large space-based survey telescopes just to find a suitable target. And incidentally, such very small asteroids are almost all rapid spinners.
If this is real proposal, it must include the precursors and technology development required. That implies many billions of dollars and a decade of effort beyond the cost of the mission itself. None of these issues has been discussed in this forum.
That REALLY is a very stupid notion. This thing masses about 500mT. The
moon, about 7*10^19 (yeah, nineteen zeros). So if it hit the moon at, say,
lightspeed, and disregarding relativistic effects, the moon would accelerate…about 10^-11 m/s. That’s a lot of zeros behind the comma.
I wrote this as a reply to Russel… Not sure what happened there.
Agreed! If we could learn to mine an asteroid by drilling down to it’s core, we would end up with the perfect habitat for humans with built in radiation shielding, stable footing (so to speak) for instruments, and possibly even resource utilization: Metals, water, etc.
An asteroid the size of a large house might even accomplish this if it is one of the hard metal types.
If it is the “clump of rocks” type, we just put a huge net over it before digging down to the middle.
Just put the thing at Earth-Moon L2 and we have a lot of useful things in one. And a (marginally) stable orbit to boot!
NASA has launched and deployed a solar sail successfully, albeit a fairly small one. Maybe they could try sending up a concave mirrored “sail” to see if we can use concentrated sunlight to carve out a small spinning asteroid. We’re going to try solar furnace tech eventually, why not gather data without a separate dedicated program?
First no human missions to the Moon because we’ve “been there before”. Now no need to actually travel to the asteroid to test long duration space operations in preparations for Mars — just skip that central tenet and plant flags on the asteroid in lunar orbit. Which is what (flags and footprints) so many NewSpace fans decried in the first place. Then the next President can say about the asteroid: “we’ve been there before” too. Then what?
It sounds like this NASA Administrator is just floundering around, like a fish out of water. This is what we get when we dismantle a space vision, claim that NASA now has a bold new vision (of what? I wouldn’t call myopic vision a vision at all), then get wishy-washy about what they said in the first place. It just seems all jumbled and disjointed to me, no coherency, no single plan. Just lots of little this-and-thats, that supposedly will in 15+ years get us to ….Mars orbit! Then the next President can say “we’ve been there before” and relegate us back to LEO.
I’ve come to the conclusion that a Marine is not a good pick for NASA Administrator. We don’t need a follow-the-orders, yes-man administrator, who will essentially go along with dismantling a workable vision simply because he is told so. Now Bolden is trying to save the “asteroid” part and throw-away the “going to” part. I thought the new mission was to send humans farther into deep space than we’ve been to before (still sounds like flags and footprints even then).
I don’t see sustainability in these plans, just one-off stunts. At least these one-off stunts haven’t been linked together into a cohesive plan to prepare us for the first sustainable human mission to Mars. So flexible path reveals itself for what it is: achieve small, cheap stunts that don’t have to have any relevance to each other. I would support a sustainable plan that was a strategy, emplacing infrastructure for continued exploration by missions that enable other missions. You get what you pay for, and space isn’t cheap, whether commercial or government. A strategy with value would be one that built the railroad for sustained exploration to near-Earth space, cis-lunar space, deep space, then Mars.
Read Fountains of Paradise by ACC, small NEO is an ideal counter-mass for a space elevator.
Counter-mass for a space elevator, like Fountains of Paradise, except theirs was a lot bigger.
silly question… would that goof with tidal forces?
It’s not a silly question if you don’t know the answer. Everything in the universe with mass effects tidal forces, but the amount in most cases is far too small to be measured. An asteroid would have to be a lot more massive and/or dense than anything being considered to have a measurable effect on lunar or Earth tides. However, distance (from center to center of the masses) is also a factor. At the orbital altitude where we’d want to put it, the distance is too far to change anything, again for any asteroid being considered. The asteroid named in the article above (1999 AO10) is pretty small, (“probably 60-70 m across,” according to a 2010 study) and doesn’t give any indications of being extremely massive or dense (it’s likely most rock, very little metals). So, if this asteroid hit the Moon it would leave a scar, but one that wouldn’t be very noticeable compared to the terrain around it. Probably, color change (from under-surface materials being uncovered) would be the only way we’d notice the scar. To answer your original question, no, the asteroid in question would cause no detectable goofing with tidal forces.
I see you are back on the job, healthy I hope??
Steve, please checkout comment 87 and 88 in the last Spacex thread. I had late thoughts how Tinkers lifter could be turned into a lander, making it that modular spaceship system I have talked about for the Inner System Railroad. And of course I agree, There is no such thing as a silly question!
Hi George.
Just a delay (complications); I go back in tomorrow morning. Thanks for asking. I will read 87 and 88, but I’m not sure when I’ll get back to you. Take care.
Steve
In going back and reading as well as from my own small child memories of the period, there was a lot of anger against the government for Vietnam, the racial divide, and high taxes. Johnson got the democrat controlled congress to pass a 10% tax surcharge in 1968 on top of an already burdened tax structure.
Seems to me that 1968 probably qualifies as the worst year of modern history in the western world, especially in the US. Things were so ugly that in 1969 it was almost as if someone threw a switch that repowered our ability to treat one another, everywhere, as people once again. 1968 was an embarrassment.