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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: 3, Informative) by KritonK on Sunday August 19 2018, @07:17PM
Earth is a planet. By the current definition of what a planet is, it has cleared its neighborhood of smaller objects around its orbit. Ergo, no mini-moons.
If they do find any, and I hope they do, Earth will automatically become a non-planet, to the embarrassment of those Pluto-haters, who came up with the current definition.