4 ms·

Question for the Kerbal nerds: I want to land this 140-mile diameter sphere of iron on the moon. A soft landing, please. You have 10 years, timer starts when

• withinboredom 4y ago
  can you use the asteroid itself as fuel?
  • klyrs 4y ago
    I'm not sure how that would work. I imagine you'd still need to bring an oxidizer, and a lot of it?
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Solar panels and just throwing the least expensive materia to space?
• floxy 4y ago
  If you are patient and can do enough math, I think you may only need a negligible amount of fuel. If it is all done with gravity assists. I once read a paper (that I can't currently locate) with the premise (I think) of crashing one of the icy moons of Jupiter into Venus for terraforming. And you start out with a small "pebble" and do gravity assists in a chain reaction on successively larger and larger asteroids in the asteroid belt. I guess this would also be dependent on there being a sufficient amount of various sized of asteroids distributed throughout the belt which are mapped pretty precisly. And you might need various "error-correcting" trajectories of other bodies as well to account for various measurement errors. And you also need to make sure that none of the left-over asteroids subsequently crash into earth.
  • klyrs 4y ago
    I know this theory, and that's why I put a time limit of 10 years! There's a whole community of people who play around with orbital simulators, and I'm curious if we can get some realistic-looking numbers on what such an endeavor would require. Because, of course the next question is "where are you going to find all of that fuel" and I'm guessing that the answer is probably something like "a 40-mile asteroid rich in hydrocarbons."