Tag Archives: asteroids

Asteroids Again.

asteroidsgame

After spending not a few words talking about Armageddon and fake space rocks last Wednesday I was slightly surprised when an actual real-life asteroid tore through the skies above Russia and disintegrated/detonated in midair somewhere above Chelyabinsk. Thanks to the asteroid’s passage over populated areas and the modern ubiquity of smartphones with some kind of video capture capability – not to mention the uniquely Russian preponderance of car dashboard cameras to provide some protection against the now-famous driving standards in the country, as well as the notoriously corrupt traffic police – this has been by far the most well-documented asteroid “strike” in history, so I thought I’d take a little while to talk about it, and the reaction to it.

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Armageddon Ist Verboten.

affleck

gnomishlich asks

Armageddon, terrible movie about oil drillers on an asteroid how would a space shuttle or other space traveling vehicle fare for persons odds of arrival, survival, and departure from an asteroid?

Oh god, what have you done. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE.

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Home On The Lagrange.


Having explained the basic concept of gravitational barycentres, I can now get to the meat of what I wanted to talk about: Lagrange (or Lagrangian) points.

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Voltaire As Applied To Asteroid Mining.

Empress Josh asks

This wacky Lets Mine All the Asteroids scheme. Viable y/n.

Ah, a question where my answer isn’t immediately “That’s stupid” or “We couldn’t ever do that.” Mining asteroids isn’t stupid, and we probably will be able to do it at some point. The real question here is, can we do it today or (as I suspect Sergey Brin et al. damn well know) even fifty years in the future? And is it going to be worthwhile?

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