Deep Space and Interplanetary Exploration - Houston, we are go for launch!

[Prospernia]

The best way to mine 16 Psyche is to nuke of chunks, and then use probes to maneuver the bits into LEO for human-mining.

[rebs]

Here's a great shot of one of our neighbors, M31 Andromeda, that recently won a photography award from the Greenwich Royal Observatory.  Details in bellow link.


https://www.space.com/royal-observatory-greenwich-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-15-winners

[Daryk]

Great shot indeed!  It definitely earned that award! :)

[rebs]

NASA's Parker Solar Probe has been in the direct line of fire from our sun, catching the brunt of the latest Coronal Mass Ejection.

The good thing is its robust shielding was designed to withstand a lot of punishment.
The gathered data will be invaluable. 

Read more in the following link.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/massive-sun-outburst-smacks-nasa-spacecraft/

[Wrangler]

I'm curious if they've been able to do any visual observations with the probe.  I know their trying us it forecast the 11 year solar cycle, I do find it remarkable it's held up to all the punishment the Sun puts out.

[truetanker]

Like 5B and some change years from now, Milkdromeda!

Woot!

(yeah  )

TT

[Kit deSummersville]

The best way to mine 16 Psyche is to nuke of chunks, and then use probes to maneuver the bits into LEO for human-mining.

But to nuke it into chunks you'd have to put the nuke deep inside and that would require a drilling team....

[truetanker]

Better get Bruce! 

TT

[rebs]

But to nuke it into chunks you'd have to put the nuke deep inside and that would require a drilling team....

This.  And if we could get that kind of equipment up there to it, then we don't much need to worry about bringing it down to us here.  Anything we need off world can be produced out there with a similar amount of initial effort.  Orbital facilities in the outer reaches of the Asteroid Belt or in the Trojan clouds that orbit ahead and behind Jupiter would mean we don't have to worry about excessive radiation for workers, either. 

[Natasha Kerensky]

Fortunately or unfortunately, nuking asteroids for resources is an outdated scifi fantasy.  Modern modeling shows that even small, 10-20km-sized asteroids would retain the material pulverized by a nuke.  Gravity stands in the way and would be even more pronounced on larger asteroids like Psyche, which measures around 175km at its widest.  Nukes can fracture asteroid minerals, but they really can’t cleave off chunks or boulders and send them flying.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/think-we-can-nuke-away-an-incoming-asteroid-think-again/

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/7/18251559/asteroid-blow-up-how-to

Completely pulverizing/destroying the smaller asteroids requires something like 10,000 Tsar Bombas.  And that power has to be directed and delivered in a short timeframe to overcome gravity.  We couldn’t just drop a Tsar Bomba every couple minutes.  It would be an insane weapon.

And even if we could pry chunks of ore off asteroids, we wouldn’t send them to low-Earth orbit to be processed, for a few reasons:

1) Miscalculate with a big enough chunk, and we’d put a crater in the Earth and whatever disastrous effects accompany the impact.  No government or insurance company will cover that risk.

2) Miscalculate with a small enough chunk, and we’d burn it up in the Earth’s atmosphere and lose the investment.

3) It takes a lot of energy to slow down an object so that it enters Earth orbit, nevertheless lower the orbit to LEO.  Energy = money.

For all these reasons, should asteroid ever become a thing, it will probably resemble terrestrial mining.  Machines and/or people will dig/drill/mine material locally at the asteroid and maybe even refine the ore locally as well before shipping the product elsewhere.

And honestly, given how fast many asteroids are tumbling and the insane energies that would be involved in despinning them, the Venn diagram overlap of asteroids with very valuable concentrations of minerals at/near their surface and asteroids with accessible rotations may be vanishingly small.  I was tangentially involved in NASA work about a decade ago to bring a very small (we’re talking truck-sized) asteroid to lunar orbit to give Orion/SLS something to target, and there were practically no candidates even though we didn’t care about whether the asteroids had economical ores.

FWIW, apologies for raining on anyone’s parade.

[rebs]

Excellent insights, NK!  Glad you shared them.

With the effort to bring a whole succession of nukes into space, drill to place them, or launch them with tons and tons of specialized equipment, we could easily just bring up drilling and mining equipment and set to work.  And with basic refining and foundry equipment, and basic manufacturing equipment, we could then build more advanced and specialized manufacturing facilities.  We could then go from there because we would open up the resources of the entire Solar System for utilization. 

[Garrand]

Better get Bruce! 

Dumbest movie ever. Only reason to watch it is that it had Liv Tyler in it.

Sorrynotsorry.

Damon.

[Wrangler]

Would asteroid mining really be beneficial as far as larger operations versus the proposed grab a rock and pull it near orbit to dismantle it? It's not that I don't believe in doing that versus tearing up terrain on earth, my impression was that we don't know where we're getting and frankly I don't know if there's as many rocks out there that would be worth the while to dismantle.

I do think however, if you find like an asteroid that's all of a rare Element it could in fact disrupt the economy for the world. Something that was a rare commodity could become uncommon or not so rare.

I think the stumbling part is right now is access to space in the first place. I do believe the startup rocket providers commercially could be the gateway to doing such operations, but I still think we have a long ways to go.

[Kit deSummersville]

Dumbest movie ever.

Oh it doesn't come close to the travesty that is The Core.

[ANS Kamas P81]

Ah yes, The Core...not quite on the level of Battlefield Earth but the quintessence of "laughable plot" IMO.

[truetanker]

We can soft set onto another place be it asteroid or lunar / satellite.

We can remiss radiation seepage, water and air tight locks, decompression chambers and aero / water ponic gardens.

If we built 10m tunnels with regolith concrete reinforced with lead powder coating on hollow aluminum struts wrapped in several layers of screen meshes also lead powder coated meter or so thick.

Followed by a leaded glass shell with an aluminum tube five meters circumference and support this with internal ribbing every half meter or so, so you'll lose another meter in support. But still a 12'(4m)H x 12'(4m)W x 21'(7m)L tunnel.

Dig several in a cluster along with a common access point, who knows?

We know how to make water, use an electric bulb to both heat and produce self rechargeable tech. (Remember the black and white paper experiment? Crookes radiometer)

If we feed it any thermo or light source and attached a reusable recharger to it to help battery life, we can also assign a cluster or two of solae cells to capture the light created.

TT

[Kit deSummersville]

We can bring back a sample from an asteroid to study the material here on Earth!

[Daryk]

If it's spinning slow enough, sure! ;)

[truetanker]

We could even do an elliptical orbit that'll take years to retrograde into a safe zone if we applied small corrects periodically. Slow burn here, slight deceleration using planetary gravity wells, around the sun orbit(s).

Doesn't have to be a direct massive quick burn...

Say five or six years deceleration and another fourish to manually maneuver it to a geo-static Lunar orbit. By that time almost a decade or so has gone by...

TT

[rebs]

Would asteroid mining really be beneficial as far as larger operations versus the proposed grab a rock and pull it near orbit to dismantle it? It's not that I don't believe in doing that versus tearing up terrain on earth, my impression was that we don't know where we're getting and frankly I don't know if there's as many rocks out there that would be worth the while to dismantle.

I do think however, if you find like an asteroid that's all of a rare Element it could in fact disrupt the economy for the world. Something that was a rare commodity could become uncommon or not so rare.

I think the stumbling part is right now is access to space in the first place. I do believe the startup rocket providers commercially could be the gateway to doing such operations, but I still think we have a long ways to go.

This is true.  But asteroids like Psyche and Vesta are said to be remanent cores of what would have become larger bodies.  They are filled with useful minerals and materials. 

And economic disruption is always a risk when opening up a new sector of the economy, such as the new frontier of space.  Look at the tech bubble.  We can't allow things like that to hold us back from doing as you suggest and getting into space on a more frequent basis. 

As for resources and use, what we have on Earth should be for Earth use.  What we need up there or on Mars should be harvested up there or on Mars as soon as we are capable and able to do that.  Or we won't have much of an economy to disrupt anymore here on Earth.

I agree that we have a long way to go.  But thinking about it right now and discussing the difficulties and problems to overcome is not a bad place to start.

[truetanker]

Sad as this is, Nazi and Russian thinking was/has been about brute force lifting, NATO thinking is about both brute and reusability. We should be thinking multi usability and smaller dedicated multipurpose lifts.

Shuttle was one such thing, but limited to a certain payload. Falcon Heavy is a possibility, but only in a near orbit to restock / brute lifting.

What we need is a Space Habitat that can travel under its own power.

For that, we need a new way of thinking, something that can take a punch that won't pop it like a balloon, and still continue on. Be it a Frozen, Electronic or Ablative shield.

TT

[rebs]

More JWST images.  Here's a wide shot of planet Uranos that is said to contain 27 of its known moons.

Here is a link to a Space.com video that labels a few of the more-visible moons.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/uranus-in-4k-james-webb-space-telescope-sees-the-planet-rings-and-moons/vi-AA1h4a7z?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=cd08e170839f400bbe9640057b4db7eb&ei=10

And here is a video (also from Space.com) of Neptune through the Near-Infrared Camera onboard JWST.

I know some of the images were posted before but I don't know if the videos were posted, and I just wanted to bring these links and images of the Ice Giants together in one post.

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?&q=JWST%204k%20vid%20of%20planets&mid=0667140EDA2DC41322960667140EDA2DC4132296&ajaxhist=0

[Daryk]

Nice shot! That Space.com video is helpful! :)

[rebs]

I really like the Near Infrared Camera.  Combining visible spectrum with IR spectrum is a great way to view objects like that.  Neptune is there near the coldest parts of the Solar System, yet we get to see the heat generated under the clouds due to high pressure and other processes we're still trying to fully understand.

I had read since the Voyager 2 flyby that Neptune generated far more heat than it received from the sun, so the video makes perfect sense to me.  (Seriously, I even had the copy Newsweek with Neptune on the cover in all of those glorious shades of blue.  I wish I still had that, and I don't know how I was parted from it.)

[rebs]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/martian-moon-deimos-in-high-res-for-1st-time-uae-hope-probe-observations/vi-AA1h6R8Y?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=05336002a3b84c48a6a3f0b459c12c3d&ei=10

Martian moon Deimos in hi-res.

[Daryk]

That looks way smoother than I expected!

[rebs]

I think Wrangler posted Deimos pics before, but not sure about the video.  Even if he did, it's worth another view in video.

[ANS Kamas P81]

That really is remarkably smooth compared to the surface of Mars or Earth's own moon; granted it's got little gravity of its own to attract impactors but one would expect to see more pronounced craters.  Potato moon is potato!

[Prospernia]

Phobos is on a death-spiral with Mars whereas Demos is slowly pulling away, and will eventually end up in a solar-orbit.

[Kit deSummersville]

Phobos is on a death-spiral with Mars whereas Demos is slowly pulling away, and will eventually end up in a solar-orbit.

I hope I live to see that.