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from the send-mini-me-to-mini-moon-on-a-mini-lander dept.
Astronomers want to find small asteroids near Earth that would be easy to reach (in terms of delta-v) targets for sample return missions. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) could help find such objects:
The moon is not alone. Or at least theoretically it shouldn't be. Researchers believe that our planet is potentially orbited by lots of "mini-moons," little asteroids gripped by Earth's gravity that swing around the planet for a little while before burning up in our atmosphere or being flung back into the cosmos.
[...] [If] we could detect these bits of space debris when they enter our orbit, we could capture samples from the space rocks and bring them down to Earth to study, new research in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science [open, DOI: 10.3389/fspas.2018.00013] [DX] suggests. It would be faster, cheaper and more efficient than our big budget missions, including the current OSIRIS-REx sample and return mission to the asteroid Bennu and Japan's Hyabusa 2 mission to the asteroid Ryugu, which take millions of dollars and years of planning and zipping through space to accomplish.
"At present we don't fully understand what asteroids are made of," co-author Mikael Granvik, of Luleå University of Technology, Sweden, and the University of Helsinki, Finland, says in a statement. "Missions typically return only tiny amounts of material to Earth. Meteorites provide an indirect way of analyzing asteroids, but Earth's atmosphere destroys weak materials when they pass through. Mini-moons are perfect targets for bringing back significant chunks of asteroid material, shielded by a spacecraft, which could then be studied in detail back on Earth."
According to the team, the LSST is a "dream instrument" for finding the fast-moving mini-moons because its massive mirror will be able to detect very faint objects and its field of view will allow it to survey the entire sky more than once a week, giving us a good heads up when a chunk of asteroid begins orbiting Earth. Once we find a few targets, the team suggests that we can begin using satellites to study them and shuttle the samples back to Earth.
Also at Discover Magazine and Space.com.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:34PM (2 children)
Two interesting google-topics you won't find in the journalist treatment or most other places are
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point [wikipedia.org]
About 250 years ago (not a typo) a theoretical mathematician discovered there's places of positive and negative stability aka specific semi-stable solutions of the 3-body problem in any two body orbit. Naturally "moons" will accumulate in the stable places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network [wikipedia.org]
About 250 years after the dude above found the semi-stable areas, people were really interested in the truly stable areas because they need no active trimming to keep in position (in extremely non technical terms the natural drift direction is into the spot not away..). Belbruno is most famous for popularizing using the NON-stable previously mostly ignored Lagrange points (again horribly inaccurate non-technical terminology) kinda like a gravitational slingshot to move around the solar system, admittedly very slowly, for practically no fuel compared to all other known orbits.
Another awful hand waving analogy is the classic chaos theory stuff about flap a butterfly wing get a hurricane in the other hemisphere due to amplification of error effects, and the ITN thing is ... what if the butterfly were an AI or at least a really smart mathematician then a flap here and flap there at the right instant and you've got weather control. Kinda sorta. Random trash and debris in outer space has no guidance package and on average the main effect of the anti-stable lagrange points is they're slightly cleaner than the rest of space, but if you bolt a guidance package and very small maneuvering thrusters on, then you can go almost anywhere for no fuel. Admittedly very slowly. Great if you're trying to deliver titanium ingots mined from the asteroid belt and don't care if it takes twenty years, not so great if you're trying to keep spam in a can alive for an interplanetary mission. The expensive fuel way to get to the moon takes three days, the darn near zero fuel way takes five months.
Belbruno has two books on the topic, a pop-science book and a semi-serious math textbook. I've read both. I would not recommend the math book as "first orbital mechanics text". Anyway it was pretty interesting.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 19 2018, @01:55PM
Lagrangian points are talked about all the time. We're sending JWST to Sun-Earth L2, where many other observatories have gone, and more will follow (such as WFIRST). Here it is mentioned in an article [space.com] about LOP-G (surprise, we don't need LOP-G). And here is an Earth-Moon Lagrangian point station concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_Gateway_Platform [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Sunday August 19 2018, @03:59PM
Sounds like a bad place to put a fragile telescope you don't want hit by random rocks :-p
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