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posted by mrpg on Sunday November 18 2018, @07:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the scary dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Walk, don’t run, on the martian moon Phobos. A new study finds that traveling faster than about 5 kilometers per hour on some regions of the Red Planet’s largest satellite could shoot you straight off into space.

Phobos (pictured[*]) is an odd duck among our solar system’s moons. It’s tiny (a fraction of a percent the size of our own moon) and is shaped like a potato; that weird shape draws gravity to different places, depending on where you are.

All these features make Phobos a challenge to travel on, researchers report in Advances in Space Research. In some places, moving any faster than 5 kilometers per hour would be enough to free you from the moon’s meager gravitational pull, sending you off into space where you’d likely be captured by Mars’s gravity and end up orbiting the Red Planet. The fastest you could travel anywhere on Phobos would be about 36 kilometers per hour, or a little faster than a golf cart, the team finds.

[*] Here is a link to the picture.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 18 2018, @11:29AM (2 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday November 18 2018, @11:29AM (#763438) Journal

    Yeah, the only way we will be running around there is if we hollow it out, spin it, and turn it into a space station.

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday November 18 2018, @02:59PM (1 child)

    by Immerman (3985) on Sunday November 18 2018, @02:59PM (#763497)

    At a mean diameter of 22 km, with a mass of 10^16 kg, spinning it up would be a major project, and would likely tear the thing apart anyway. However, if you were to excavate a large round chamber you could put a "traditional" rotating torus space station underground, while only needing minimal stabilization. Build it near the center of the moon, and you'll even be in freefall, which would simplify a few things.

    Doesn't have the easy expansion potential of tunneling into a spinning moon - but unless the thing is solid rock with high tensile strength, that "gravity" that holds your feet to the floor is going to be hurling the surface into space as well. And building a bag strong enough to hold all the bits of a spinning asteroid together could be a real challenge.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 18 2018, @03:31PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday November 18 2018, @03:31PM (#763509) Journal

      Perhaps some strategic excavation, melting, construction, etc. could be used to strengthen Phobos and Deimos and make them sturdier than mere "rubble piles".

      Alternatively we could hasten the process of ripping it into smaller, more manageable chunks.

      Or we could redirect smaller asteroids into orbit around Earth/Moon, Mars, or Ceres and try it on those.

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