Posts tagged asteroids
Earth's rotation is slowing down, and in this article Randall Munroe gives some ideas to accelerate the rotation - or at least to keep it from slowing down as quickly. He concludes that the only "s...
What if there was a binding global resolution passed tomorrow mandating that all countries gradually close down their terrestrial resource extraction sites and instead source from asteroid mines? W...
What would be the likelihood of an asteroid developing a thin layer of gas? If an asteroid is capable of having an "atmosphere", then how likely would be be for primitive plant life, such as a moss...
An entrepreneur has a dream. He wants to create the most amazing and magical amusement park in the solar system. He goes to investors with the blue prints of the park, and they think it's a good id...
As a follow-up to this question, what would be the effect(s) of a high-speed of super-heated plasma entering and impacting on a planet? The planet is about the size of 1.2x Earth(s), with a simila...
"At this very moment we face a threat insurmountable to Man. We are faced with two options. Stay on Earth and die, or leave Earth to space." - UN Preservation Council, CE 2047 Earth, year CE 2047 ...
I need to wipe out a city. Not a huge one (I won't let them grow beyond a certain limit), but big enough to need to do some pretty serious damage. Let's say something similar in size to Pompeii. (y...
With the proper composition and mass, is it possible for a planetary body to collide with Earth and embed itself onto the mantle? To clarify, while immense destruction would undoubtedly occur to t...
Once the technology is ready to reach and set up a base in Mars (perhaps 10 years if SpaceX expectations come true) could it be possible to build a route among the asteroids to reach Jupiter's moon...
On the Earth, with our atmosphere, even small objects entering the atmosphere such as Tunguska or Chelyabinsk can do devastating damage due to the shock-wave travelling through the air. People coul...
We actually today have programs to keep an eye out for various rocks in space that may hit Earth. It's a common sci-fi trope that when one is on course to hit us, we deflect it. That's pretty muc...
We are in the future in northern North America (U.S or Canada). The land has "risen" (or more accurately, filled in) with several hundred feet of earth and sand and silt so that a modern city will ...
If a space station were to be built in the outer solar system, is there an asteroid beyond Jupiter with a ratio of rare earth elements high enough to make it worthwhile to mine for the rare earth e...
Is it possible for life to evolve"” and survive"” on a planet that is regularly hit by [relatively small"” usually no more than a few feet across when they make an impact] meteorites? If so, what e...
There's a lot of talk on futurist blogs about mining asteroids for propellant and other resources for space travel, but I have something else in mind. Could a spaceship, starting out in geocentric...
I want to know about the plausibility and required parameters of the following scenario: Take an Earth-like planet, about the same size, composition and gravity. It has no plate tectonics to speak...
For the sake of analogy, let's take the Chixclub impactor and move it a mountain range akin to the modern Himalayas. Obviously we're dealing with an extinction level event here so I'm not concerned...
In the not too distant future, mankind has established several mining bases on Ceres. There are a lot of spaceships which come and go. Large mining machines are chewing up the interior for resource...
I've seen some posts here (for example this one) for the effects of certain sizes of impactors, but I'm not finding any definite answer and all my google and google scholar searches have not turned...
Okay, so I'm working on a novel and I'd like to have a dense asteroid field, something akin to the old ESB Hoth field, though it doesn't need to match that exactly. The notion is there is an advan...
66 million years ago, the dinosaur empire was in its death throes when its final nail in the coffin came hurtling down from the sky. A clump of rock the size of Mount Everest smashed into the Gulf...
In the far future, man is trying to build a small colony in the asteroid belt - on one of the bigger asteroids. All the materials are to be mined from asteroids, and it is assumed the colony will h...
An asteroid collision big enough and fast enough to see a massive ejection of rock and moon-chunks, from the surface of the earth AND not wipe out the population of the planet. What size and speed...
I've been poking around similar posts, but none seem to contain the information I'm looking for. I'll try to keep it brief. In the year 20XX, some powerful organizations are trying to "land" an as...
The Emperor (may he live forever) plans to visit the Solar System on a rare royal visit in ten years' time. The Bureau for Interplanetary Tidying have decided that the Asteroid Belt is an eyesore t...
In a story I am writing there is a being with Superman level strength, flight, the ability to produce lasers, and survive in space. He has decided to solve the mineral crisis by finding and grabbin...
I am writing a theory for a game that is in an apocalypse. An asteroid is heading for earth and will crash into the earth regardless in this theory. It is 1km in size but due to the YORP effect it ...
I am writing a scenario for a game that I am a fan of. It involves an asteroid heading for impact with the Earth in 2027. This asteroid's initial diameter is about 1km, but it is slowly disintegrat...
Could a ~150 mile (240 kilometers) crater form from a small object impact? So the object impacting the site of the crater is a human shape and not able to be destroyed. The location of the impact ...
With the Kuiper Belt being composed of well over 100 million objects - some grand, some insignificant - is it possible to hide an asteroid base from enemy sensors within its confines, combined with...
What I want to know is if an asteroid about 15 KM in diameter and roughly double that in length, spinning at a significant speed, could go undiscovered until a crew of an asteroid mining ship happe...
Suppose you could pump a load of energy into an asteroid at a safe distance. As energy gets added to the object, does it make sense that this could be done in a way to get the asteroid to different...
Let's say there are billions of asteroids in the galaxy, varying in size from baseballs to hunks of rock almost big enough to be dwarf planets. If someone wanted to set up a habitable location on o...
I am wanting my 32km x ~7.5km buried space habitat to be hit with a cataclysmic disaster which changes things from everyday life to a survival lifestyle. I would like the station to be damaged to ...
In my story there is something akin to an Island Three O'Neill cylinder buried vertically into the side of the asteroid Vesta. It is 5 miles across and 20 miles long. The station is buried but is...
At the end of Book 6 of my book series, a magic ritual has caused a large meteorite (around 1/4 the size of the one that caused the chicxulub crater) to ram into the small planet (around the size o...
In the near future we may find cargo ships fleeing space pirates! Given that... It's a small cargo ship carrying 10 metric tons of wheat (cargo volume, approximately 13 m3). Total volume: 100 m...
So, the idea in a story is that in far far future there's a trend that rich people, they are able to buy themselves planets. Tiny little planets with sizes 4-6 km (3-4 miles) in diameter. The compa...
If I push a couple of magnetic asteroids into mars gravitational field, could they form an interlocking series of magnetic fields able to protect mars from solar winds? Size limits for asteroids ...
Is it unreasonable to suspend one's disbelief that an asteroid belt naturally formed with enough mass distributed through the belt to justify the formation of a belt-wide atmosphere given the follo...
Inspired by comments to JBH's answer to The worlds between, the consequences of instantaneous FTL. The Premise A technology for instantaneous travel exists, making it possible to travel to any po...
Could humans sustain life after a k-t like extinction event? I know that a long lasting winter was a side effect then, but humans have technology to protect against cold. What other effects of an a...
I'm wondering if it is plausible that a large asteroid (interstellar in origin? Or, perhaps launched from the Kuiper Belt by something big with a lot of gravity?) would be able to smash into Luna a...
For the purpose of this post, full spectrum means a non-trivial number of frequencies within a non-trivial band. So human eyes aren't full spectrum within the visual range (each cone is wide band, ...
So I was thinking of using the asteroid Vesta as one of the many asteroid colonies in my future solar system. Is it a viable candidate or is there any "problems" with it. The colony would be made o...
As the title says, I'm wondering if a species could theoretically boost an asteroid near a planet for easier mining access. If this was to accidentally crash into the original planet could a habita...
I'm looking into the destructive power of a 5km asteroid strike, a bit smaller than the k-Pg event. How does the angle of the strike affect the destructive capability of a land-based impact. For e...
Question If a ship went through an asteroid belt where the asteroids are mostly ice, could the ice in any way transfer onto the ship and give it coatings of ice in various places, or would there b...
I'm working on a sci-fi game about conquering little asteroids (about 1 km diameter). You can go into one of them and make it Earth-like so other humans, animals or plants can live there. To do th...
I'm looking to build a scientifically plausible mining laser for my science fiction setting. The first approach that came to mind was a high-power laser that heats the surface asteroid until it bec...
