Missions to an abyss

[IgorZakh]

Can comets and asteroids use as delivery system of space shuttles to other planets?

 

[IgorZakh]

Mission to an abyss

IgorZakh[/color]":wnb5p48f]Can comets and asteroids use as delivery system of space shuttles to other planets?

 

[MeteorWayne]

Maybe they can help, but that is in the future.

 

[centsworth_II]

Can comets and asteroids use as delivery system of space shuttles to other planets?

From an energy standpoint, they would be no help. Here on Earth, if you could catch up to a truck with your car and hook on, you could use the energy of the truck to pull you along... get a free ride. But in space, once you spend the energy to catch an asteroid or comet, you will continue going that speed with no further expenditure of energy whether you hook up to the asteroid or not. The only reason to hook up would be to explore it, in which case that was your mission from the beginning. It would be a poor method of traveling to another destination.

ESA's Rosetta mission will land on a comet and ride it in as it circles the sun, but that is to study the comet itself, not to travel to another destination.

 

[StrandedonEarthsince1970]

I suppose it could be useful if you were going to mine water and other consumables while on the comet. Otherwise you may as well just use a cycler ship as mentioned in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars series. Similar to a cruise liner that never docks, the passengers and crew board and leave the cycler on small ships.

 

[scottb50]

Can comets and asteroids use as delivery system of space shuttles to other planets?

From an energy standpoint, they would be no help. Here on Earth, if you could catch up to a truck with your car and hook on, you could use the energy of the truck to pull you along... get a free ride. But in space, once you spend the energy to catch an asteroid or comet, you will continue going that speed with no further expenditure of energy whether you hook up to the asteroid or not. The only reason to hook up would be to explore it, in which case that was your mission from the beginning. It would be a poor method of traveling to another destination.

ESA's Rosetta mission will land on a comet and ride it in as it circles the sun, but that is to study the comet itself, not to travel to another destination.

If you jump at the right time, aim the right way and apply the right amount of Energy you can get anywhere.

Other then mining the body it is pretty useless. Once you match it's orbit you are going as fast as it is and in the same orbit, attaching to it is irrelevant unless you are getting a resource from the asteroid or Comet. Then it might be worth the weight.

 

[centsworth_II]

If you jump at the right time, aim the right way and apply the right amount of Energy you can get anywhere....
Other then mining the body it is pretty useless.

You start out sounding like you think hopping an asteroid to go somewhere is a good idea, but you then seem to recant. I agree with your recantation.

 

[scottb50]

If you jump at the right time, aim the right way and apply the right amount of Energy you can get anywhere....
Other then mining the body it is pretty useless.

You start out sounding like you think hopping an asteroid to go somewhere is a good idea, but you then seem to recant. I agree with your recantation.

What I was trying to say is it would be easier to just go where you want to go rather then hopping a ride on a celestial body.

 

[freya]

Hook on to an icy comet, and you have one massive fuel tank - Space Shuttle tank times (at least), 100,000. A lot of fuel if you have nuclear power, alot of other elements to sustain the mission, manned or unmanned. Sadly, not in my lifetime, me thinks.

 

[tanstaafl76]

In order to use the velocity of an asteroid or comet to your advantage you would have to put yourself in its path and let it slam into you, thus transferring its inertia. Unfortunately I don't think there's any known way of surviving such an impact in a safe and effective manner. I suppose you could come up with some clever tether system, but once again I don't think we are there yet technologically. If they had anything on them you could mine and turn into fuel I suppose you could turn them into a big floating gas station for your spacecraft but we are a long way from being able to establish a semi-permanent mining operation on a small orbiting body like that; especially considering the most advantageous orbits would probably highly elliptical and would undergo large shifts in temperature/environment as the distance from the sun changed.

 

[centsworth_II]

Hook on to an icy comet, and you have one massive fuel tank...

Once you have caught up to the comet, you will already go wherever the comet is going with no additional energy expenditure. If you say you can use the fuel from the comet to go somewhere else, chances are you would have been better off just going there directly instead of using up your fuel to catch a comet to make more fuel to go where you wanted to in the first place.

 

[XairstrikeXD]

There is no friction in space so if the shuttle only has to get to a speed to stay at it [if my bad grammer makes sense]/b]

 

[scottb50]

In order to use the velocity of an asteroid or comet to your advantage you would have to put yourself in its path and let it slam into you, thus transferring its inertia. Unfortunately I don't think there's any known way of surviving such an impact in a safe and effective manner. I suppose you could come up with some clever tether system, but once again I don't think we are there yet technologically...

You should let the Japanese know about this, they've done it, among some others. The idea is not like pool, it is to attach to and ride along with that object.

If they had anything on them you could mine and turn into fuel I suppose you could turn them into a big floating gas station for your spacecraft but we are a long way from being able to establish a semi-permanent mining operation on a small orbiting body like that; especially considering the most advantageous orbits would probably highly elliptical and would undergo large shifts in temperature/environment as the distance from the sun changed.

From what I have seen from Hayabusa and other close encounters, the resources would be pretty hard to exploit unless you wanted to be at that objects orbit, for some reason. Either way the hard part is getting to that orbit, once your there the fact something else is there also doesn't really matter. It's much simpler, cheaper and safer to just go from point A to point B. Why go to C.

 

[freya]

I guess you'd go to C when B happens to be a long way away i.e. light years.
Comets are like great big bags of fuel orbiting the sun. Imagine how much easier it would be to get to the moon or planets if the Earth was surrounded by (natural) fuel tanks in LEO. You wouldn't have to haul all that stuff up from the Earth, just rendevous and either fill up or strap on and away you go.

 

[CalliArcale]

I guess you'd go to C when B happens to be a long way away i.e. light years.
Comets are like great big bags of fuel orbiting the sun. Imagine how much easier it would be to get to the moon or planets if the Earth was surrounded by (natural) fuel tanks in LEO. You wouldn't have to haul all that stuff up from the Earth, just rendevous and either fill up or strap on and away you go.

There are lots of cool hard SF stories along those lines. I remember one (possibly by Asimov or Clarke) about a team of asteroid-miners from Mars who, wanting to make Mars self-sufficient and break away from Earth's water-based dominance, flew to Saturn, selected a nicely large chunk of ring material, melted some of it down to make propellants for the trip home, embedded their ships in the chunk itself, and then flew it home, crashing it on the surface of Mars. The meltwater immediately started boiling, but they figured they could capture enough to keep them going until they could mount additional missions, especially now that the concept was proven. Earth could no longer hold them captive by threatening to stop water shipments, and they could safely declare independence. It was a cool story.

Another cool story was in Clarke's book "2010". Though this was omitted from the movie, in the book there was a competing mission to Jupiter: a Chinese spacecraft called the Tsien, which got there ahead of Leonov by not bothering to bring propellants for the return trip. They landed on Europa, drilled through the ice, and prepared to start pumping up water to crack into hydrogen and oxygen for propellants. But there was something alive under the ice, something big and lured by the ship's floodlights. It broke through the ice. The Tsien sank, and was never heard from again.

Refueling from ice worlds may one day be possible. There are a lot of technological and logistical challenges to overcome first, but I think that will be a very significant source of fuel in coming centuries. Not in our lifetimes, but perhaps our great-great-grandchildren will see it.

 

[scottb50]

I guess you'd go to C when B happens to be a long way away i.e. light years.
Comets are like great big bags of fuel orbiting the sun. Imagine how much easier it would be to get to the moon or planets if the Earth was surrounded by (natural) fuel tanks in LEO. You wouldn't have to haul all that stuff up from the Earth, just rendevous and either fill up or strap on and away you go.

Just rendezvous is the easy part, equipment to do the mining as well as those needed to operate it would add substantially to the needs. Simply finding a body in a usable orbit would be quit a challenge in itself.

Now if it were mining the body and returning the products that would be another story.

 

[CalliArcale]

Just rendezvous is the easy part, equipment to do the mining as well as those needed to operate it would add substantially to the needs. Simply finding a body in a usable orbit would be quit a challenge in itself.

I'd totally forgotten about that part, but yeah, that's probably the biggest problem with the concept. Forgiving the technological limitations that prevent it from being useful, the whole concept depends on serendipity -- finding a comet or asteroid that happens to be going the right way at the right time. And the odds against that would seem to be pretty high unless you're not picky about where you're going.

 

[XairstrikeXD]

another vairable that could make it hard to land on a comets surface is that all the other asteroids and comets in the oort cloud and the asteroid belt could collide with the target

 

[scottb50]

another vairable that could make it hard to land on a comets surface is that all the other asteroids and comets in the oort cloud and the asteroid belt could collide with the target

I think it has been proven simple enough to land on just about any surface. My problem is with using them to get somewhere else in the Solar System. Doing work, while on the surface, is the real problem, not so much moving around and things as getting the right equipment in place to even do something. Once you achieve the orbit of an object you could land on it, with minimal energy use, or simply keep pace with it in it's orbit with no energy input. Either way, unless it was headed exactly where you wanted to go or you needed resources from it and had the means of exploiting them it would be a waste of time and energy.

 

[emudude]

I think this is an interesting idea, as it provides a potential source of water while you travel with no need to bring any with you, a giant meat shield against micrometeorites across a significant part of your surroundings, a solar radiation blocker, etc.

 

[scottb50]

I think this is an interesting idea, as it provides a potential source of water while you travel with no need to bring any with you, a giant meat shield against micrometeorites across a significant part of your surroundings, a solar radiation blocker, etc.

I hope this doesn't turn into one of Vogons food threads.