Let's capture and harvest asteroid 2004 MN4

[holmec]

>I have often thought that one of the best future uses for the ISS <<br /><br />I doubt that the ISS could pull this off. Perhaps using crew quarters of the ISS with a Processing plant module attached would work. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#0000ff"><em>"SCE to AUX" - John Aaron, curiosity pays off</em></font></p> </div>

 

[frodo1008]

holmec: First post good thinking! Second I have a possible point. The research that I refer to does not have to be full scale. All that would be needed would be small scale research into possible manufacturing meyhods. I would hope that with 5 full labs on the ISS itself that this would be possible. However, if there can only be 2 or 3 people on board, the maintenance tasks alone would eat up far too much time to make this work.<br /><br />Your point about some kind of free flying module to help is well taken however. Such a module could be used for those experiments which might be too dangerous for the ISS with its compliment of human beings on board to perform. Of course, the module itself would then have to be heavily automated with people only visiting to set up experiments and then retrieve results.

 

[cyrostir]

how much thrust would it take to slow it down into earth orbit? Then we have all the time in the world to find out how to harvest it. The first thing we need to figure out is how to slow it down into earth orbit. landing for example, shuttle engine based robots might be able to slow it down. Then once its orbiting the earth we have time to create a mining robot or maybe even a manned mission to study it, since it is a lot closser than the moon the mission would be less expensive.

 

[scottb50]

The latest mass I can find is 4.6x10^10 KG. I would suspect that would take a lot of Shuttle Engines. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>