Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Chinese want to Capture Asteroid?


In a complete reversal, it would seem that Chinese scientists are studying ways to capture an asteroid and bring it into Earth orbit! Why?!!! Well their initial argument is for mining purposes.

I can think of a million reasons why this sounds like a really bad idea, the Chinese scientists feel:
  • they could tweak the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid by just enough to get it to temporarily enter Earth orbit at about twice the distance as the Moon. The orbit would be unstable, and eventually the asteroid would drift out of near Earth Orbit - but it would be in proximity long enough for research and mining.
Initially the Chinese would start small...a hundred foot or so but there is every indication that asteroids in the mile wide metallic asteroids are being considered - with an estimated worth in the trillions.

Read the complete article for more details.

Complete Dvice Article Here
Wiki article on asteroid mining

4 comments:

John said...

All your @ss(t) Roids are belong to us!!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano

Yeah, this is a great justice... We will obey justice and take off every zig...

Beam Me Up said...

Yep, lol my first thought...

Tim said...

This does not surprise me. I read books as a kid that had missions like this in them. The asteroids could be a great source for various resources...though you have to figure out which ones. Though I think we just left them in the asteroid belt and sent the mined resources back home. Of course those books also assumed we would be much further along in our space program...sigh.

Beam Me Up said...

Yeah, if it is already out there, why play with fire. The Chinese want to try and park a NEO at the L2 point out past the moon. Not one of my favorite parking spaces because stuff parked there, as a rule, won't stay long.