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Space Science

Exploring the Asteroids 192

Posted by Hemos from the just-one-week dept.
quakeaddict wrote to us with a cool feature about the upcoming Near Earth Asteroid Rendevzous with Asteroid Eros. It's got a rundown of the schedule of the mission. Hmm...now if they could just work out asteroid mining, we'd be doing fine.
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Exploring the Asteroids More

Exploring the Asteroids

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  • Why this story? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why does this story count as worthy enough to be posted on Slashdot? I mean, what the hell does this have to do with Andover.net, VA Linux or any of their really neat-o keen employees? I thought this was Slashdot -- All VA Linux stories, all the time! I want to read more articles on why VA Linux buyout of Andover.net is the biggest event since Linus was born. I want to know about the incredible personalities behind the company. I want to know! Please! Please! Please! I want my VA Linux stories!

  • It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover. I realize you're just a troll with unusually high karma but since you admittedly usually browse with banners blocked you could at least have checked the facts.

    I'm not even sure why you're so up in arms about JAVA banner adds. You can not click it, use junkbuster like you normally do or disable JAVA. Just because somethings there doesn't mean you HAVE to click on it.
  • True story: When the first Space Shuttle was launched, I was working in Austria at a U.N. econometrics institute - which is to say a boondoggle and nest of spies. About half the East Bloc contingent there worked for various security and spy agencies. Mostly they were there to keep an eye on the legit researchers - when they were not filching BSD Unix to run on their stolen VAXes.

    It was by no means certain the Shuttle would work: tremendously complex, solid fuel boosters, lots could go wrong. And the Russians were working on "Buran" - their own shuttle. Everyone at my workplace was watching TV when the shuttle went up. At the moment it cleared the launchpad structure, one of the Russian KGB men whispered to me "It's over, you have won." I looked at him and he repeated his statement. I could tell he meant much more than that the race to build a space shuttle was over.

    Lesson: There are bigger purposes than space exploration that drove development of craft like the Shuttle. Look at Hubble and compare it to 70's era spy sats, like the one in the Smithsonian. A strong family resemblance. On can only wonder, for now, what the Shuttle was really meant to carry. Someday it will probably come out that the Shuttle was something like the "deap sea mining" ships Hughes built to raise a russian sub, or the "deap sea rescue subs" that did who-knows-what. Remember Reagan's "Orient Express" hypersonic plance announcements? Wonder what black program that quietly slipped into?

    Any buffs out there have a chronology of classified shuttle flights? Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?

  • Excellent post.

    Getting into space in a big way is a very long term project. We are best off collecting information and trying some simple experiements for now.

    As for overpopulation, there are some places on Earth that are overpopulated, but the Earth is still pretty empty. This is not counting any technological changes that might let us live under/on the seas in large numbers. In a thousand years, our ability to house and feed people might seem as relatively primitive as medieval agriculture and fishing is to us.

    So it won;t be to get elbow room that we go to space. Space colonization will have to have its own rewards that outweigh the challenges, costs, and inconveniences. This balance may not be reached for quite a long time, like thousands of years. A good supprting project would be to make sure we have clean elections, personal and economic liberties, and good educational opprtunities all over the Earth so we don't end up resetting the Human Progress register to zero at some point between now and when we are ready for really going to space.

  • It probably ended up landing on top of the Mars Polar Lander ;)
  • We should not forget that there was 100 years between Columbus and the British colonies in America. At first the explorers were all trying to find a way to discover riches (spices, cities of gold, whatever) which could be brought back to Europe.

    But the real money was made when people began to realize they could go to America and create wealth to be enjoyed there.

    The same logic applies in space: As long as we try to justify space exploration by wealth we can transmit back to earth, we will continue to be defeated by the fact that we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well. And trying to find wealth at the bottom of another gravity well like Mars only doubles the difficulty.

    Energy is free in space, and transportation is free as long as you avoid those pores on the face of the space-time continuum we call "planets." So the only question is whether we can find the elements we need out there in the asteroid belt (or the rings of the gas giants, since transport is free).

    And the elements we need basically come down to water (which includes oxygen, of course) and a little carbon. There's lots of iron out there, so we can probably avoid using this inconvenient aluminum stuff.

    Perhaps it's unfortunate that Americans were the first to discover the means to get to space. They don't want to go there until they build something there that's better than modern America. And, let's face it, the United States is a pretty nice place to live.

    Too bad the Haitians don't have space travel. They'd probably be heading out all the time. You think the Challenger disaster shows a risk in spaceflight? Try crossing an ocean in an inner tube sometime.
  • This isn't me. Note the "." at the beginning of the user name.

    Bruce

  • 1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.
    No one is seriously proposing such a process. In the short term mining would be for water (probably in the form of water ice) for use in space (electrolyzed, as fuel and oxygen, or "straight" to drink).

    Moving mass off Earth will stay expensibe for a while, but getting it back could become cheap rather quickly. You only need to drop something slightly below orbital velocity and it will start being slowed down by the atmosphere. Simple controls will crashland it on the desert or ocean of your choice. Not much more is needed to soft land.

    Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.
    All the better. For most purposes you actually want a mini-comet, say 10m across and mostly made of "dirty snow". A mining probe simply floats near it, puts a "bag" over all or part of the surface and starts heating it up with reflected sunlight. Then pipe the steam round into the shadow of the mirror and condense it. Rock is juts a nuisance, and landing is just a way to cope with too much gravity.

  • Going straight to karma hell, but shouldn't somebody post, Eros naked and petrified (forget the hot grits). Afterall, Eros is the Greek god of erotic love (much better a topic than NP). But then again, the petrified part of things would sort of put a chill of things. Then again, the chill could be counteracted by hot grits:-)

    More karma hell. I have to wonder what is the shape of the asteroid Eros? If you saw two movies last summer (one was the Phantom Menance) then you know that it look like a dick, woody, wang, johnson, prick, wiener, privates with two... Also, please don't answer this by posting by putting up the infamous link. Been there, wish I did that.

  • What's the point of asteroid mining?

    Firstly, where it might cost $X a tonne to mine iron ore, get it to the processing plant and rip the iron out here on Earth, you can park a big mirror behind an asteroid, net it, spin it, and get millions of tonnes of stratified minerals for maybe $X/10 tonne. This is possible because vacuum doesn't conduct or convect heat away, and energy in the form of sunlight is readily available

    Second, nasty things like oxidation don't happen in a vacuum, so processing said minerals is also easier, and achieving higher purity is also easier.

    Thirdly, and most interesting from my POV, an infrastructure is necessary to do this, and can also be used for other things; and the byproducts of refining, regarded as junk on earth, are still useable as building materials and reaction mass - and are already in orbit.

    If you don't want metal or other products in orbit, the solution is simple: you make a big hat-shaped thingy out of your ore, park anything else you want to deorbit inside the hat, and drop it peak-first into an ocean. A little of it ablates away during the drop, but most of it survives to float "gently" down like a shuttlecock at a few hundred miles an hour an wind up as a big metal barge floating somewhere near its final point of use. I'm sure Japan would consistently land theirs on whale herds for research purposes, but never mind.

    It would lend new meaning to the phrase "at the drop of a hat" and the choice of Linux distribution to run the instrumentation on would be moot. (-:
  • ...by Robert Anson Heinlen. Read it!
  • That's what happens when you drop a rock straight down from space to ground on Earth. It would go through all the significant atmosphere in about two seconds, maybe three. Throw a car-sized rock (say 8m3 @ say 3t/m3 = 24t) at 11km/s, and even if you lost half, that's a staggering number of joules converted to heat at impact.

    Go view some footage of Shoemaker/Levy hitting Jupiter if you think throwing rocks is trivial.
  • A standard sized gold brick is worth about $250,000. A shuttle launch cost what $20,000,000? 100 bricks to break even.

    A subsidised launch is $50M, so 250 gold bricks. Real cost, what? $100M (500 bricks)? $150 (750 bricks)? Which weigh enough to seriously challenge the flying ability of a Shuttle, plus if you didn't stack them evenly about the floor of the load bay and brace them, would seriously challenge the structure of a shuttle.

    Then consider the effect of dumping tens of tons of gold on the market every few months.
  • Somehow I think this doesn't make much sense. I think even a 2000 pound bomb is going to make a bigger boom than a 20000 pound sphere dropped from 50,000 feet.

    The sphere isn't going to get going fast enough on the way down to disintegrate or explode. All it will do is bury itself into the dirt.

    This sounds like the myth of the penny dropped off the Empire State Building.

  • Re:11km/s (Score:1)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    Throwing rocks is not trivial. Dropping them from 30,000 feet IS trivial.

    If you think that dropping a large steel sphere from 30,000 feet will make a bigger boom than a bomb, then why did they put explosives in the bombs? You see my point?

    Nobody's arguing with you about objects dropped from solar orbit onto Jupiter.
  • A penny will *not* go through a person! There's something called air resistance, and a penny would sting a bit if dropped from the ESB, but it wouldn't kill anyone.

  • No way. (Score:1)

    by kels ( 9845 )
    A shuttle launch costs more like $500 million (depending on how you do the accounting).

    The outside limit of the shuttle's maximum landing payload is about 50,000 pounds. With gold at about $300 per troy ounce, that's about $220 million in bullion you could bring back, if it was already hanging around in low earth orbit.

    You still lose plenty. Or rather, the taxpayers do.

    PS Sorry about the lame units, that's how NASA gives the numbers [nasa.gov]. And gold is always troy ounces.

  • NEAP (Score:1)

    by Bersig ( 16082 )
    If you like that, you might be interested in SpaceDev's [spacedev.com] spacecraft, NEAP [spacedev.com]. It's a totally privately-financed project to rendezvous with the asteroid Nereus in 2002. It is currently scheduled to launch in 2001.

    The cool thing is that they plan to stake a claim to Nereus, thus the "P", for "Prospector".

    From one of their PRs:

    The spacecraft, Near Earth Asteroid Prospector (NEAP), first in a series of SpaceDev deep space Prospectors, will carry up to five advanced scientific instruments to an asteroid near the earth in order to analyze its size, and determine its composition and value. SpaceDev intends to sell the acquired data as a commercial product as well as stake claim to the asteroid in order to set a precedent for private property rights in space.

    "NEAP's success will prove that space is a place, not a government program," said Benson. "Private companies and the public can and should have a direct stake in the opportunities space exploration and development have to offer," he added.

    I really hope they pull it off!

  • We don't even have any people in space, let lone moon bases, space stations, etc... Zero, Zilch, Nada... Unless I am forgetting someone there is no one on Mir, the International Space Station, Orbiters, or Space Shuttles. If you asked someone 20 years ago if there would be humans in space on the dawn of the new millennium(*), they would have answered yes, of course!

    (*)Using word millennium based on popular usage, and the fact I start counting at 0 not at one!
  • There is one good reason why we should not mine the asteroids, or be selective about the asteroids that we do choose to mine.

    And that is the future of the human race.

    Sometime over the next thousand million years, the Sun will heat up sufficiently to render the Earth uninhabitable. All the people on Earth will have to find another home somewhere, and that home will ultimately be in another solar system. We will probably need a very large supply of readily-accessible metals so that we can send all the human population of Earth to another world, along with a necessary part of Earth's ecosystem.

    If we mine all the asteroids indiscriminately, when the time comes we will be unable to escape the solar system. Squandering the whole of this metal supply so that a select few can live in luxury in their lifetimes may turn out to be the ultimate crime against humanity.

    The solution is simple. Make the biggest metal-rich asteroids off-limits, but allow smaller asteroids to be mined. That way, the mercantile interests of asteroid mining companies will be adequately served, and asteroids will be preserved for the inevitable future exodus from the solar system.

    --
  • Hey, isn't Eros the hollowed-out asteroid where Ender and his squadron led the attack against the Buggers?
  • ...where Eros is in relation to Earth. I saw a whole buncha numbers about where it is in relation to NEAR, but not to home. Anybody got some REALLY pertinant numbers?

    Kagenin

    "Space boy, I'll kill you...it won't be long"
    Smashing Pumpkins

    ==
  • Yes, OT, but it does make a decent point. That Java banner is pissin' me off.

    Hey /. guys, don't suppose you could knock off the Caffinated Banners, couldya?

    Kagenin
  • <i>All helium on earth is primordial and when freed from pockets underground, escapes into space. Earth will soon run out of helium and no process (safey or economically) produces it in bulk. However, Jupiter's got loads of helium to spare. </i>

    Oh my goodness, what will we do without helium? How will the novelty balloon industry survive? Funny voices? Gone... We will be forced to liquidate all clowns... hmmm... what are the downsides of this again?
  • The estimate I've heard is that the sun will go red giant in 5*10^9 years. That's quite a while. I suspect that 5 billion years is long enough to think of something more elegant than a "simple" solution. In fact, there will have to be a better solution, since the real bottleneck in evacuating people from Earth would be in getting them to orbit in the first place.
  • Never heard of that. A steel ball would have a high terminal velocity and a lot of inertia, but not enough for a kinetic blast. Dropping it from orbit it would reach much higher speeds...and only be in atmosphere for the last 10 miles.

    I did, however find: "Glenn Dropped From Shuttle Experiment" [spaceviews.com]

  • Maybe NEAR status [jhuapl.edu] will help. Diagrams and numbers.
  • Asteroid mining [permanent.com]. Do some web searches.

    • We'd prospect for the kind of asteroid we want. Metal or fluff, depending upon whether we need metal framework or acoustic tiles.
    • Any part of the surface is "a place to land". Low gravity. Harpoons probably needed to stay in solid contact.
    • Smelt with mirrors. On Earth we can melt metals with mirrors. A lot easier when we don't have to hold mirrors in place against gravity.
    • Space colonization is not a population growth measure. Not enough people can be moved...unless we can build space elevators [spacefuture.com]. Colonists would be a few people and their children. Population growth can happen off-planet also.
    • Space is enormous. Plenty of room for some humans.
  • You don't understand. You keep your metals in orbit, where they're useful to build your space infrastructure very quickly.

    A single nickel-iron asteroid has more metals than we have available in the Earth's crust, so that's a lot of building material. You might find it useful to bring down some platinum, gold, and titanium if you really need it...and those aren't as abundant here.

    Of course, if you really want to bring down iron you can. You can deliver a lot more of it to any location on Earth than the competition could...just start building iron gliders in orbit, or iron darts if you have enough room for the crater.

  • Actually, the Space Shuttle can carry a bus. But a bus is hollow. A solid chunk of iron is much heavier.

    You can see the effects of a 150-foot piece. It's called Meteor Crater [meteorcrater.com]. Crater 2.4 miles in circumference.

    I agree with the previous poster. Read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress [zompist.com] for the classic rocks-from-space show. Follow it up with Footfall [randomhouse.com].

  • Um.. you think using up the metal supply will destroy it? No, it can be recycled. If nothing else, toss your garbage in a solar furnace and everything will melt/vaporize and you can smelt it down to what you want. Remember, when you're in space you can make large enough mirrors to get a lot of heat.

    The worst that could happen is a lot of the metal gets dropped in the sun. But a single asteroid has more metals than we have here on the surface of the Earth. And if we really needed the metals we might make some really big magnetic tubes and distill what's floating in the sun...but first we can mine Mercury and Venus if we're that desperate...or help Io spray itself into space more quickly.

  • Wasn't Heinlein the only major SF author who said we'd leave the Moon once we reached it? I'm sure he was not trying to predict that, it just happened...
  • To mine an asteroid we'd probably need to put a mass acclerator on it. Nobody wants to do it yet though because putting such a thing in space would horribly upset the peaceniks who think that if you put one thing that could be a weapon up there whos to stop the spread. See Al Gore's campaign page for a load more foolerly like that.
  • Here's [sinistarunleashed.com] another version, it seems asteroid mining angers interstellar warlords.
  • Mining the Sky is good, as is the previous volume Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment [amazon.com], which provides a reason to mine asteroids. (I.e. Develop the space infrastructure or die.) I've found the book on sale at Barnes & Nobel for $6.

    I also liked Lewis and Lewis' earlier work (out of print) Breaking the Bonds of Earth: Utilizing Space Resources (or some such).

    Haven't picked up a copy of Comet and Asteroid Impact Hazards on a Populated Earth: Computer Modeling [amazon.com] yet. Must see if the Univ of Arizona press has it, because I'm still angry at Amazon.
    --

  • First of all, the Earth's gravity is not much less in near-Earth orbit than it is on the ground. For instance, at 600 km, it would be within 20%.

    Secondly, I think the terminal velocity argument it moot, since you (and I) have no idea what terminal velocity of a rock would be.

    However, here's something to notice...

    Sans atmosphere, it would take about 350 seconds to hit the ground from 600km. Thus, it would hit at about 3500 m/s, which is about 2 miles per second.

    So, even without wind resistance, we're talking only 16% of the kinetic energy of the same rock at 5 miles/sec. Then you add atmospheric drag, and you're probably in the single-digit range.

    --
    Patrick Doyle
  • The article describes an air breaking system similar to the one TGV Rockets [tgv-rockets.com] designed for their re-useable rocket.

  • NEAR Earth Asteroid Rendesvous...

    I like recursive acronyms that actually make USE of the first word.
  • Anyone have a good conspiracy theory about classified space planes?

    Well, you could search on Aurora.

    I also recall reading somewhere about huge tanks of liguid methane at Lockheed, and plans for a small, hypersonic wave rider (maybe mach 5).

    All useless conjecture, though.

    George
  • Phew, thanks for pointing that out. Fingers moving faster than brain, I'm afraid. Should be fixed now. Please feel free to write me at alan.boyle@msnbc.com with any fixes or suggestions re space and science. I really enjoy tuning in /. and am gratified whenever y'all mention a story of mine.

    Best, Alan Boyle
  • The article does say:

    The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.

    actually, i just took the readings from the near mission status page, which is accessible via http://near.jhuapl.edu ... it's very cool, provides some sort of javascript updated distance for near-eros and near-earth.

    by the way, the distances change quite a bit from day to day, i'll have to update them.

    best, alan boyle, msnbc

  • True, but it fills up netscape's memory and causes Navigator to crash.

    And you're blaming *Slashdot* for this??



    #include sig.h
  • Check out the "Astronomy picture of the day" for 02/10/00 [nasa.gov], which features a very cool (but unfortunately very low resolution) movie of asteroid 433, which Eros is set to rendezvous with on 2/14/00... -y
  • It's only dumb to land vertically if you never intend to make it practical on a commercial basis. Commercial practability means the ability to land the sucker at existing airports, which, considering horizontal-landers typically need a runway the size of Tennessee, is impractical for any but a vertical-land craft.

  • the X-33, THATS a reuseable spacecraft looks much better too.

    Now if only it could be made to fly... as of the last Critical Design Review I attended, it was still 5000 pounds overweight. Which a certain group of engineers pointed out years ago, and were subsequently canned.

    Bring back the Delta Clipper. Now THERE's a spacecraft.

  • Better idea. Allow unrestricted mining and exploitation now. Within 100 years, someone will be building a starship.

    Actually, they'd be building permanent orbiting colonies inside of 20 years, and it would be child's play to turn one of those into a starship.

    Either way, don't block of the easiest and richest strikes; that might prevent it from happening at all.

  • Boom


    OK I'm done with this user id. Does anyone know how to change a slasdot user id? Or how to remove your own account? Any help appreciated.

  • Well if its possible to do this, it probably could be used as a weapon of mass destruction. But it would not reduce the threat of your enemy responding with convensional nukes. So your country would be radiated, there's would be destroyed but rebuildable.

    Not like the laser work that has been done, on being able to shoot nukes down as they come in. Which prevents your enemy from responding in kinda to nuclear war.
  • I would rather see us be able to move asteroids first - not only would we be able to prevent them from hitting us, we could somehow bring them closer so that we could mine them more efficiently. But we're still looking at something pretty far off - I think we're going to see cybernetics and really high tech first. I mean, it takes a lot of energy to get out there, and theres no really inticing reason to do it yet. Maybe when we run outa stuff terrestrialy.
  • It was the obnoxious Javascript bouncing ball in the Sun ad which finally made me kill Javascript in my browser. I killed animations long ago, and I am now nuking connections to every ad site which tries to serve me a cookie.

    I will never see ads from sites which serve cookies, and I will not see anything except the first frame of animated ads. If you want the impression revenue or click-through revenue from me, you should not use cookies or animations from any ad on your ad servers. Rob, Jeff, are you listening?
    --

  • It's been one of the revolving adds for quite a while, possibly since before Andover.

    Today was the first time I saw those things on slashdot. And they are annoying.

    --

  • Has anyone read Mining the Sky [amazon.com]? The reviews on amazon make it sound pretty good, but I already have a huge queue of books to read, so I haven't gotten around to purchasing it yet.

    --

  • The military did look into this at one time. I believe it was something like droppping a high density object (ball of steel) from a B-52 or the like flying at 50,000 feet. The destructive power was less then Hiroshima, but still much greater then conventional weapons. I think the tests were done in the '50's. I have no idea where I heard this/read this, but I do remember it. So unless it came from a crack dream, there you go. Of course, the downside is you can still acheive a pseudo-nuclear winter from all the dust ejected into the atmosphere.
  • In a few billion years we will either have expanded throughout most/all of the galaxy or destroyed ourselves. If we haven't spread beyond this solar system in even a million years, we don't really DESERVE to exist because we really ARE the Alabama of the universe...

  • Yeah, I remember that. Cool book. But I was driving an Atari ST at the time and couldn't afford a Mac, or the hypercard, or the electronic form of the book. I especially like the idea of targeting the "brass" first to shorten the war... That and using the GAU-8A as a primary weapon; G.E. We bring good things to light.

  • All right, I'll bite; what should I have used? I was doing (very) rough numbers and felt that two significant figures for g was pushing it. And I could have gone the whole gravatational constant times mass of Earth times mass of projectile over radius of Earth times radius of orbit, and even thrown in a terminal velocity calculation (even a teflon coating wouldn't eliminate air friction, just reduced it), but I was just looking for a ballpark figure and 9.81 m/s^2 is what I used in Physics I, II, III, Statics, Strengths, and Dynamics...

  • "Throwing rocks" was an important part of the Lunar revolution in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and the aliens in Niven and Pournelle's Footfall kicked off their invasion by dropping a not-quite-dinosaur-killer sized asteroid on Earth...

    On a less fictional note, back in the 80's, there was a military project being debated called THOR which involved 10kg steel "needles" parked in orbit; when the time came, they would de-orbit and a minimalist guidance system would put them down on top of a tank or hardened bunker. Let's see; 10kg, call it 100km orbit, 9.8m/s^2, ~140s drop time, ~1400m/s on impact (little or no friction 'cause of their shape) restults in nearly 10mJ of kinetic energy colliding with your target. Ouch. Too bad the idea wasn't sexy or expensive enough for SDI...

  • The responses to the message above may have a certain validity... But they ignore a few things:

    There are other options besides the shuttle... We're talking about getting lumps of metal back to earth, not humans. Cheaper transportation should certainly be possible.

    Also, it might be uneconomical to do shuttle flights with the intent of carrying gold down alone, but remember that there's already shuttle missions bringing material up, which could have some of their costs offset by carrying mined material back.

    Last but not least: Gold is certainly not the most economical thing to bring back... Platinum for instance is much more rare and more precious, and there's plenty of other alternatives as well.


  • wow. in that diagram, the asteriod matilde is even bigger than the sun, even. I'm worried. They say that it won't hit the earth, but that's a big piece of rock...
  • Not to continue the OT fest, here, but I agree 100%. You're all acting like folks who throw a hissy fit in the restaurant because the cook has thrown a little parsley or kale on the edge of your plate. Just ignore the damned kale and go on with your meal. If the garnish really deserves this much attention, then maybe you should eat elsewhere-- 'cause it's pretty clear that the food here isn't doin' it for ya.

    (Besides, I sorta liked playing around with the little car-- it was a nice distraction from my distraction from work. But I eat the parsley too, so go figure.)

  • Oops. I think that should read 4,700 kilometers
  • You mean you don't have those yet?
  • Note that you posted tomorrow.
  • The asteroid people thought was going to kill us in 22 years may not after all: http://www.msnbc.com/news/319598.asp [msnbc.com].

    Darn. =)

    Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".

  • There really hasn't been any significant technological progress in space exploration since the early 1980s. Sure, probes are smaller and cheaper, but that's because the onboard computers are smaller and more powerful. Otherwise, the most advanced "spaceship" on the planet is little changed from when it was developed in the 1970s. That's right, the shuttle.

    So what happened to the space program, in the US at least? With the technology that was available, it was getting prohibitively expensive to keep moving forward. The real benefits of the space program were being felt dirtside, especially the development of more powerful computers.

    Computers happened. When computers became The Next Big Thing, and no significant progress was arising in space exploration (that little thing called the Challenger explosion didn't help), our priorities shifted. Now most of our engineering is focused on making the computers faster, smaller, and more powerful. Maybe in a couple generations of desktop computer, we'll be able to start taking space exploration seriously again. Maybe not.

    I'd offer an analogy to a tech-advancing strategy game like Civ II, but it's late and it's time to hit the road.

  • Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.

    Pisses me off that we've not moved ahead with that, but hey, I guess we have better things to worry about as a species...

    Still, these asteroid adventures seem pretty nifty. If only we'd get heavy industry involved in space expansion, and start putting all our massively destructive industrial manufacturing in space or on one of these asteroids, it seems like we might actually make some progress.

    I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas ...

  • Good points, all true.

    I guess we're just not ready, politically and socially.

    Some of us are, probably, but I fear thats only because we're not really facing up to whats in front of us, socially, politically, and technologically, as a species.

    I mean, sure, if there were a cheap way to do it I'm sure there'd be a massive exodus to space by those in our society who'd like to do things they can't do on Earth, but that's a long ways off, I'm sure.

  • That's true, but at 100km altitude, it's still 9.5m/s^2. For back of the envelope calcs, G is basicly constant for that range, so just good old E=mgh is good enough. Hmm, 10kg*100000m*9.65m/s^2 (average accel) gives 9.65MJ. I don't think I want to be hit by that.

  • Okay, we agree that it isn't worth it to send the shuttle up in space to mine all the gold that is hanging around for the taking in orbit.

    Lets change the parameters slightly. You send the shuttle up for some unrelated mission. Repair the hubble or whatever. Now take a day, however much the shuttle can safely get back to earth, and leave. No it isn't profitable on its own. But if you have a payload that will pay for a one way trip, and nothing profitable to take on the return trip, you can still make money with the unprofitable because you have to come back anyway. So long as the cost of one extra day in space (when nothing else is going on, is less then the worth of the gold on earth you come out ahead. So using yourn figgure, the cost to repair the hubble is no longer $500 million, but 500-220 = 280 million dollars. Still a great cost to tax payers, but much less then otherwise.

    Of course this ignores the effect on the price of gold. Not that it matters, since there isn't unlimited amounts of gold un orbit just waiting for someone to take.

  • Ah, yes, asteroid mining. Does any else remember being a kid and thinking, "hey, in 2000, we're sure to have Moon bases and Mars bases and be mining the asteroids and...". And now here it is, the year 2000, and we don't even have a proper space station yet. Little missions like this are fine, but isn't it still terribly disappointing that the space race lost most of its momentum after Apollo?
  • Oddly enough - during this rather eventful wekk we've had Brian Marsden as a guest at the Observatory. In case you don;t know - Brian is the man in charge of cataloging all the asteroid observations and determining orbits.

    He also decides who the discoverer is and therefore who gets naming rights (so of course I spent the whole time being very nice to him in the hope that I'd get an asteroid 'Manley').

    Currnetly there are observations of almost 60,000 objects so it's going to become quite difficult to come up with names.

    And now NASA is confounding his problem by taking close up photos of Eros - these photos have craters - and there's now a competition to come up with names for the craters.....

    ho hum

  • Russian authorities have tested a reusable space vehicle, at a fraction of the cost of a Shuttle, and the tests were highly successful. The only problem is, they can't find it.

    Read the story here [go.com].

  • by 2000, we'd all have personal jet packs and be wearing silver suits with a black V on the front.

    I have to admit I'm a bit disappointed.
  • I hate to be an asshole and abuse my +1, but a horrible Java banner appeared ad on slashdot! It was for Jane's IT and wanted you to move a car around or something. I usually browse with junkbuster, but I decided to use a windows box for a few seconds, and this is the shock I get!

    Slashdot/Andover gets bought by VA Linux, and a few days later Java banner ads appear. Coincidence? I think not.

  • Dang! So that's [msnbc.com] where my other slipper went!

    Just wait till I get a-hold of that dog...

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Even if the stell balls don't have the energy to explode when they impact they do have the energy to go right through most structures. A penny dropped from the top of the Empire State building would go right through someone's body. It would be for the most part a psychological weapon, a rain of high velocity steel pellets would mutilate a city.
  • while controversial because people envision asteroids raining down on us like in so many movies is a very viable solution to the problems of raw resources. Lets saw we push a 500m (thats cubic meters and is pretty small compared to Ceres or Pallas) asteroid into the Earth or Moon's orbit for mining, there are many tons of raw materials just sitting there. Lets say it was a rocky asteroid (95% silicates) it could be ground up and used for any number of materials. Silicon structures (aerogel) are very light and very strong and would be easy to make from raw silicon. An iron cored asteroid would give us oodletons of ultra high quality steel, the metal would form a prime crystalize structure in microgravity and be about 5 times stronger than theb est steel made here on Earth, not to mention its production would be virtually pollution free. Besides raw material a hollowed out asteroid would make a really nice shell for a space station since the layer of rock would absorb a good deal of the solar radiation humans don't particularly like and provide a prefab superstructure. Once the infrastructure for space-mining is in place it will provide a very clean and very profitable business. The Sun spits out plenty of energy to use for smelting, factory power, material reclamation, ect. And for those Deep Impact fearing folk, we could set up specific zones for certain size asteroids, big ones wouldn't be allowed in certain orbits.
  • Negligible dingleberry, Eros is very large, the probe landing on it it very very very very small by comparison. It will have a similar effect to you headbutting Mt. Everest.
  • There's a great article on the hazards of asteroid exploration here [activision.com]
    --Shoeboy
  • or Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. A classic space invasion story if there ever was one, and you can always count on Niven for very exact science.

    Chris
  • There was an excellent Wired article [wired.com] about this subject that talks about NEAR's mission director Bob Farquhar, his expertise at using unique orbits to slingshot objects, and his habit of scheduling mission events to coincide with interesting dates.

    The rendevous was initially scheduled for a different date. "January 10, 1999, the day the spacecraft was due at Eros, was the fifth anniversary of his civil marriage to his second wife, Irina."

    It's a very interesting read!

    - StaticLimit
  • You can see THOR in action in the "David's Sling", along with the first information war. You can buy the book [barnesandnoble.com] but I noticed a reference that it might have also been in Hypercard. Anyone know more about the electronic form? If I buy a copy, is there a Linux viewer?
  • You mean you don't have those yet

    He's prolly from Europe, I heard they haven't even been to the moon yet...

    *retreats into Y2K shelter*
  • I haven't read it, but I'm assuming it would go something like: "And boom, no more balloon" -- by Newton's third law and without an incredible amount of wind resistance (which would be scarce at high altitudes), your high altitude balloon would probably explode from the sudden thrust. So you have one shot, assuming no one shoots your balloon down first.
  • "No one has ever orbited a small body in space," he said. "The orbital stability is rather tenuous, and as we travel around Eros our navigation maneuvers must be perfect to keep us from crashing into it."

    Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?

    The spacecraft and the asteroid are both roughly 136 million miles (219 million kilometers) from Earth -- and experts emphasize that there's absolutely no danger that Eros will collide with our planet, at least for the next few million years or so.

    Why such emphasis? What are they trying to hide? Big deal, so Eros isn't an Armor or Apollo asteroid. Hey, wait a second: Apollo + NASA == conspiracy, right? Wait 'til I let my friends [newpower.org] in on this one.

    On a more serious note, I've been waiting for the NEAR for a couple years now. We know all about the chemical composition of most of our planets, but before now, we never knew as much about asteroids, even though there're so many more of them (and there's a much greater chance that one of them will show up at our front door with a pointy reckoning than there is for something like Venus). A kudos to NASA if they pull this one off. As Congress is currently hammering out the new budget, NASA can't afford to mess this one up.
  • distance (in miles)=136000000
    distance(in metres)=136000000 * 1609
    c=300000000 m/s
    => time (in s) ~= 720

    So, this interaction will take place 12 light minutes away. Allowing for errors, let's say 1/2 an hour round-trip time for signals. OK, the orbital time will be pretty low, but it's still a serious challenge.

    If they land this thing on, with a signal latency like that, can NASA have their budget back please?

    Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick any two.
  • On Tuesday, the 18.3-foot-wide (5.6-meter-wide) spacecraft was less than 2,900 miles (4,700 miles) away from Eros...
    Insert joke(units_conversion,Mars,NASA) here.

    I don't even want to talk about how far away from Eros I am right now.

  • Marginally on topic... asteroid mining, elite, frontier, open source, elite open source code... ok give me some points for trying.

    For anyone who fondly remembers elite and might not have heard of recent developments.

    Frontier developments is now working on Elite 4 and there is a plan to make the full source of the original elite games open in a limited fashion.

    see here: http://www.frontier.co.uk/eliteclub.html

    Also, the BBC source code was posted unofficially to the net and is available here:

    http://home.clara.net/cjpinder/elite.html

    Oh yeah, in elite 3 you could go into orbit round asteroids and even land on them.

    See it is on topic after all...
  • Yup. I'm constantly harping on about how we're supposed to have Moon bases and hotels in space, and missions to mars by around about this time.
    "People build railroads when it's railroad time." Maybe it's not Mars time yet.
    I guess the gravity well is bigger than our ability to overcome it right now, alas ...
    Let me rephrase that for you: the gravity well is bigger than our need to get people out of it right now. In the 1960's, we had a need to do something big in space. It was a competition with the Russians designed to build national prestige among other nations and keep more countries from defecting to the Communist bloc. We could have had satellites in the 50's, but Von Braun was told "no" by his superiors. We didn't get them until it became a dick-size contest, and we didn't let anyone forget that we bailed Europe AND the USSR out a mere 20 years earlier: our dick really WAS bigger. And once we'd proved it, we took our bat and glove and went home.

    Today we have tons of space going on, but national prestige is pretty much out of the picture. It's mostly in the things that pay in the medium of commerce, the greenback. Communications satellites produce revenues in the billions of dollars per year and are definitely worth fighting 5/6 of the way out of Earth's gravity well. We have no similar push to explore the Moon or Mars or return resources from asteroids because there's no profit in it. Space science is science, worth a few billion dollars a year worldwide, otherwise not that big of a deal. The largest manned-space project going today is actually a form of foreign aid and constructive bribery to keep the former USSR from letting its rocket and nuclear scientists go to places like Iraq or North Korea.

    When it's railroad time, people will build railroads. What would make it Moon time, or Mars time, or 1992 KD time [nasa.gov]? Something that would make it pay. Most everything on Earth is far too cheap to be worth going to space to get more. It would certainly be cheaper to get large quantities of iron or oxygen from somewhere in space to ship them to Earth orbit than to launch them up, but there is as yet no market for bulk commodities in orbit to justify the expense of the first mining venture. It is a chicken/egg problem, looking for someone with a clever enough idea to bootstrap it.
    --

  • Okay, say you did get it up there, or find a rock that big out in space. How the heck do you propose dropping it throught atmosphere without it burning up?
    Um, maybe you let it fall by itself? Fist-sized rocks fall to Earth all the time with no more damage than a thin "fusion crust" melted on one side. Somewhat larger rocks hit the ground at considerable speed. A rock the size of a car, sent down more or less vertically, would arrive largely intact and at hypersonic speed. THAT would be quite a weapon; even falling at a mere 5 miles per second, it would cover the last 50 miles (including all the significant atmosphere) in a just ten seconds.
    --
  • The speed you need to get into Earth orbit is roughly 5 miles per second; dropping something in from the Shuttle, as someone suggested, wouldn't start it any slower. (It wouldn't start vertically, but that wasn't my assumption.)

    An object falling to Earth from infinity will be moving quite a bit faster, at a minimum of 7 miles per second. Oh, your math is wrong. At constant acceleration, v^2 = 2*a*d. With v = 8000 m/sec and a = 9.81 m/sec^2, d = 8000^2/(2*9.81) = 3.26e6 meters = 2027 miles. Of course, the acceleration isn't constant, it falls off as the inverse square of distance. Are you up to doing the integral of G*M(earth)/r^2 from r=4000 miles to infinity? You might find it illuminating.
    --

  • Anyone who is even thinking of mining asteroids has never felt the wrath of Sinistar.

    He hungers....
  • Well, if we are getting technical here then.
    "Dropping" it would just put it into Earth orbit as well....
  • LOL, this thread kills me. Ok, you are forgetting a *huge* thing. If you are dropping it, that is allowing the rock to fall on its own it will only reach falling speeds. Now, what's the terminal velocity for something like a big rock? Do I know? Know... But I do know it is nothing at all like 5 miles a second... Asteroids cause problems because they are travelling at *immense* speeds. They go so fast that the slow down that the atmosphere causes is insignificant. But dropping something from an initial speed of 0? Of even shooting it as fast as we can? Umm...... NO. It's not the size of these things, it's the obscene speed relative to the Earth. Perhaps next time before suggesting something like this, actually consider the physics. 5 miles a second..... From dropping? That far out in space relying on the Earth's wimpy gravity at that distance? No. Someone out there more motivated than I do the math, and account for air resistance... Hmm, quick calculation shows that to attain 5 Mps from falling *using the acceleration at the surface of the earth* would require falling 462.5 miles. Yeah, this is a useless calculation b/c it is done only on the surface, but still it gives an idea....
  • Dang - just when you think your valentine's day couldn't get any worse, you find out that a lifeless asteroid and a hunk of metal with a camera attatched are both getting more action than you are....

    Happy 14th to those wacky lovebirds up there!

  • If you're interested in asteroid mining and space habitation (specifically, a good deal of research and writing that's been done on the subject), check out PERMANENT [permanent.com], the Projects to Employ Resources of the Moon and Asteroids Near Earth in the Near Term. They've got a great deal of information on proposed ideas as well as research that's already been done into this field.

    Here's another thing I fear... if, as proposed, they try to come within a mile of the asteroid with NEAR -- something that has never been attempted before -- and they crash, people will again bitch as NASA for failing. *sigh*

  • Little missions like this are fine, but isn't it still terribly disappointing that the space race lost most of its momentum after Apollo?

    Yes. :-)

  • Well, we all know how much NASA has perfected the art of orbiting large planetary-sized objects without crashing into them, like Mars, right? C'mon, back me up on this one, right? Please, someone tell me they didn't make their calculations in stones and furlongs again?

    An orbit like this, around an irregularly shaped object is very difficult due to different concentrations of mass.

    Even our moon, though more regularly shaped, makes stable orbits impossible. We discovered MASSCONS (mass concentrations) in the 1960's and didn't actually have a good map of them until the recent CLEMENTINE mission.

    Orbitting the moon requires regular orbital corrections, else you become crater ejecta.

    :-)

  • On Tuesday, the 18.3-foot-wide (5.6-meter-wide) spacecraft was less than 2,900 miles (4,700 miles) away from Eros, and fired its engines for the final course correction before orbital insertion.

    'Nuff said.

  • Sorry to disturb the geekstravaganza over "Mining Asteroids" and "Space Living", but someone has to do it.

    Problems:

    1) If huge bales of pure gold metal were floating in orbit and all you had to do was open the shuttle doors and scoop it up with rakes, it would still come nowhere near offsetting the cost of a shuttle launch. Or the next generation of "cheap" vehicle launches. Moving mass off earth or back to Earth is INSANELY EXPENSIVE.

    2) We have most of everything we want on earth. Noone needs helium 3 or dumb crap like that unless they're looking to offset the mass-expense of earth by making fuel/stuff on the fly. Some more platinum might be nice because there's not really enough to meet potential demand, but oh well.

    3) Many/most asteroids are made of fluff, crap, and dust. They are not rocks. They are not mine-able, and they do not offer a place to land.

    4) Where's the fuel going to come from to smelt these bad boys? Certainly we're not going to be hauling ore to and from earth?

    5) Anyone who believes significant (100k+) populations will exist off-earth within the next century is delusional. Delusional squared if they think space colonization is a solution to population growth. Period.

    6) Why bother? Earth is enormous. Space is difficult to make habitable.

    7) There is far more interesting science that can be funded with the cash we blow on NASA Stupid Human Tricks.

    8) Sending people to Mars is a pure unadulterated tremendous waste of money. Just like the Space Station under construction. Too bad Texan Congressmen and professional corporate cocksuckers don't agree.

    9) Tang sucks. Even the new stuff.

    10) I bent my wookie!

    Toodles!

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