4 ms·
Maybe we can take advantage of the fact it's orbiting the wrong way. Perhaps we can send an impactor and capture some of the ejecta. At the very least we can an
by gene-h 8y ago
Maybe we can take advantage of the fact it's orbiting the wrong way. Perhaps we can send an impactor and capture some of the ejecta. At the very least we can analyze the spectra of the impact flash to see what it's made of. Perhaps we can even fly through the ejecta plume and run it into a mass spectrometer to do isotopic analysis. If the time between the impactor and the probe is short enough, perhaps the ejecta will still be plasma which we can run straight through our mass spectrometer. It might even be possible to capture a small amount of ejecta if we use something like an aerogel particle collector like the Stardust mission used[0].
[0]https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-aerogel-rd.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stardust/mission/index-ae...
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoMaybe, but that will still be very hard. After the collision a lot of the debris will still be moving at a speed and direction comparable to the asteroid's original trajectory. Because the asteroid will have the greater mass, you'll find it'll be the net exporter of inertia into the impact mass. On top of that, making the rendezvous at such an extreme difference of speed will be very difficult.
- tomatotomato37 8y agoProblem with an impactor (besides any trailing analytical probes being sandblasted by ejecta) is that its a permanent expirement that can screw up any future passive observational experiments That being said, if we do eventually find another retrograde asteroid that is otherwise unremarkable, I would be all for an extreme speed impact experiment. If it's close enough to the sun we may even get some low grade relativistic effects being observed