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Good news for asteroid mining! Don't have to go all the way to the belt - might not even have to move the thing from where it currently is.
by RangerScience 10y ago
Good news for asteroid mining! Don't have to go all the way to the belt - might not even have to move the thing from where it currently is.
- dogma1138 10y agoThe Asteroid Redirect Mission was never about going all the way to the Asteroid Belt. We have discovered about 2000 near earth asteroids so far, this one is cool because it also orbits the earth in a fairly closed pattern but it's not unique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object That said the orbit of this one actually doesn't make it a good candidate for the ARM as it seems to be further than pretty much every ARM candidate and it's orbit isn't really good either. What we want is something that would woosh close us anyhow and we need only a relative small amount of energy to redirect it into an earth or lunar capture orbit (lunar is of course safer since if we screw up the math it doesn't end up blowing a landmark like something that was picked up off michael bay's cutting floor).