Our Moon To Get A Moon? New Mission Will Drag Asteroid Into Orbit
- Thread starter Fanghawk
- Start date
If you can fit a hundred nukes on a thirteen-foot-wide rock, then you probably should be ruling the Earth.FalloutJack said:
Now watch...they take out the 13ft chunk of asteroid, which reduces its mass and throws the thing off its path in space. Eventually the bigger one hurtles directly to Earth and "BAM!", we all suffer a new Ice Age. Congratulations, NASA, you've kills us all; except the penguins and polar bears.
Eclipse Dragon said:
A 13 foot rock wouldn't do anything if it hit us, it'd either bounce off or burn up in the atmosphere, we have rocks this size and smaller hitting us all the time with no effect.reverse_rpm said:
That would defeat the point of the experiment which is two fold, first part is testing if we can accurately get to a small target and retrieve it, also allows us to test robotic technology that would be useful in getting to Mars. Second part is testing taking people to the small target, with a side effect of allowing us to learn more about Asteroids while we're up there. Yes we have done the landing on objects before, but that was 50+ years ago, we're a little rusty and this gives the current NASA a chance to brush up on it's landing skills with minimal risk-Ezio- said:
You could lose the robotic craft sent to retrieve the asteroid, something could go wrong with the ship taking the crew to the asteroid, and that's about it. It's too small to be any risk to us on earth in any way shape or form, hence why they picked such a small object.StorkV said:
You should take this with a grain of salt, since I'm not an astrophysics major or anything like that.Eclipse Dragon said:
We kind of already have this happening on a larger scale in the solar system. The Earth is orbiting the sun, the moon is orbiting the Earth, and the sun doesn't steal the moon from the Earth. A large part of that is due to the fact that at the moon's distance from the Earth, the effect of earth's gravity is just a lot stronger than that of the sun.
However, you have to remember that "orbiting" isn't quite as clean as it's made out to be in science class. For one, you don't just have the moon orbiting the Earth, they're actually orbiting each other, just from the Earth's perspective it looks like the moon is orbiting the Earth. If you were on the moon it'd look like the opposite (Despite the fact that its gravity is having a very minimal effect on the Earth).
And that's just when you're only considering two objects in exclusion of everything else, it gets way more complicated when you consider how many large objects there are in space each having a slight pull on everything else. Remember how hard it was for them to decide whether the solar system revolved around the earth or the sun. Contrary to the story that's usually told, not all of that was ignorance in bullheaded favor of the past ways, both sides were pretty convincing at a time (Stellar Parallax was what definitively proved it one way or the other, but don't ask me what that is)
Basically what my answer boils down to is: the moon will have a larger gravitational pull where they decide to orbit it, and it will kind of be orbiting the earth in a way at the same time.
I'm pretty sure that the Earth will have a substantial effect on the shape of the orbit though, it'll probably end up being wider on the side of the earth and narrower on the opposite side
I demand a bigger rock. I want to be able to see it orbiting the moon from backyard dammit... without a telescope
not a single xhibit meme? i know it's aged, but this is perfect!
yo dawg, i heard you look moons. so i put a moon around your moon so you moon while you moon!
hmm, needs work... but the framework has been laid.
and a few things to address...
1. why not just take an earth boulder up? because it costs $10,000 for every pound of matter they have to launch into space. a 13 foot boulder might not look like much, but that just increased the launch cost significantly. it apparently much cheaper to grab a nearby boulder.
2. crashing into earth? it would burn up before hitting the surface. or at least most of it would, and the remainder would probably break into smaller rocks.
3. gravitational pull? well, so i'm not 100% certain here, but I can't imagine a boulder that small having any effect on the moon's gravity or earth's tidal patterns. that was also my first thought, but then i read how small the damn thing is gonna be. that being said, if someone who sciences would like to science their math at me, i would be happy to interface with that information.
yo dawg, i heard you look moons. so i put a moon around your moon so you moon while you moon!
hmm, needs work... but the framework has been laid.
and a few things to address...
1. why not just take an earth boulder up? because it costs $10,000 for every pound of matter they have to launch into space. a 13 foot boulder might not look like much, but that just increased the launch cost significantly. it apparently much cheaper to grab a nearby boulder.
2. crashing into earth? it would burn up before hitting the surface. or at least most of it would, and the remainder would probably break into smaller rocks.
3. gravitational pull? well, so i'm not 100% certain here, but I can't imagine a boulder that small having any effect on the moon's gravity or earth's tidal patterns. that was also my first thought, but then i read how small the damn thing is gonna be. that being said, if someone who sciences would like to science their math at me, i would be happy to interface with that information.
The only way this kind of mission is additive and viable is to literally go get an asteroid large enough to be mined for resources which would then be used to construct a permanent launch facility on the moon.
Grabbing a small asteroid for "science" makes very little sense, especially at this price tag.
Grabbing a small asteroid for "science" makes very little sense, especially at this price tag.
Yea, imagine what kinda fiasco that would be if they made contact with that comet I mean asteroid, and a person in mission control was wearing a hand crafted personalized shirt that *someone* might think was sexist. I mean, that's so silly and outside the realm of possibility we shouldn't even discuss it.Scrythe said:
I'm not sure what the point of walking on the thing is. At 13 feet, it can't have a significant gravitational pull of its own; it's got to be like a walk on the exterior of a shuttle or station where the astronaut is somehow tethered, only with a rougher surface. (And probably one where magnets aren't an anchoring option, but I don't honestly know if that even plays into other space walks.)
That kind of has a ring of "because we can" to it. "Hey, we pulled a rock into lunar orbit! And then we walked on it! We make and walk on our own moons! Take that, nature!"
That kind of has a ring of "because we can" to it. "Hey, we pulled a rock into lunar orbit! And then we walked on it! We make and walk on our own moons! Take that, nature!"
It's true that the gravity of each object effects the other. But it's not true that the perspective is the same from both points of view.The Almighty Aardvark said:
The centre of gravity for the Earth-Moon system is located with-in the Earth. Hence, no matter where you look from, it appears that the Moon is orbiting the Earth. That includes from the moon. Just like Galileo could prove that the Earth was orbiting the Sun even though it "looked" like the Sun moved around us.