How difficult would it be to turn the Asteroid Belt into a single body? What's the best method?
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 that shouldn't sully the eyes of His Mightiness and needs to be cleaned up. The obvious way to do this is to form them into a single body.
Clearly, moving every single asteroid individually would be incredibly energy expensive. Is there a way to start a domino type reaction so that the asteroids assemble themselves over a period of 10 years or so?
Here is what I have in mind when I talk about a domino reaction. https://youtu.be/5JCm5FY-dEY?t=32
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With sufficient effort, this could be done. It would require the manual alteration of the orbit of each asteroid.
Bear in mind that the total mass of the asteroid belt is around 4% that of the moon, and that around half of that mass is already contributed by only 4 asteroids. The remainder are tiny and barely significant.
It would be an awful lot of work for basically no gain.
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Probably not all in one go, but along the way why not have some fun, save your job and give the Emperor something to smile about.
Say you have a sixteen space tugs to work for you - first thing first, order 12 of them to pop out to the Kuiper belt and drag in a dozen matching 100 Km diameter KBO's (essentially comets), whilst this is happening, get the other 4 to grab Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea from the belt , and in the most efficient way place them equidistant around the inner edge of the belt.
Meanwhile the other tugs are draging their loads into equidistant positions between the aforementioned roids.
The tugs can then proceed to push all these objects at optimal speed around the belt to gather mass as they go, gradually increasing the diameter of orbit as they clear debris.
"But, what if the Emperor comes before the job's finished?" I hear you cry in alarm. Worry not, approaching from the Pole of the solar system (on the Sun's axis of rotation) his magnifience will see: - centre of his view, dark save for the sun shining like the twinkel of humour in his eye, then the inner planets, the sharp inner edge of the belt carved and delineated by the 4 planetisimals and the comets then like a great iris with their tales radiating outward.
The wise and benevolent one will recognise (with judicious prompting) the magnificent sight of a likeness of his own eye gazing benignley upon the universe, and revel in his subjects rejoicing and adulation.
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