Comments on: Scientists: Impacts on rubble-pile asteroid are different than on planets

By: Ryan Lawson

Ryan Lawson — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 16:17:39 +0000

Maybe you just park your spaceship and use an electromagnet to pull out any rocks that are iron rich? The difficulty of mining a solid rock is dealing with torque in a near zero-g environment. Any form of rotating head to drill or cut becomes unwieldy. It will also consume enormous amounts of energy to do any form of cutting or drilling. Not to mention you will be generating a lot of debris that is hazardous for navigation. In this situation you gather up all the richest pieces that have already been broken down for you and you haul them off to your space station or higher gravity processing plant.

By: Jeff Wright

Jeff Wright — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 07:08:31 +0000

It might be harder to mine…I have heard it described as being like those ball pits.

Think of The Blob—made of dirt.

Now an iron slug you can anchor to with cables—and cut into a bola with cables. At a certain distance—the inner faces of the two bola-bergs give you artificial gravity.

You won’t be in danger of being absorbed in space quicksand. These things are ochre jellies of the solar system.

By: Edward

Edward — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 00:56:18 +0000

John asked: “what does it look like when a rubble pile slams into the Earth?”

Scott Manley asked the same question a couple of years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OSvtznJYuI (12 minutes: “What Would Happen If Asteroid Bennu Hit Earth?”)

By: Blair Ivey

Blair Ivey — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 03:34:01 +0000

“Rubble piles will probably be much easier to mine for minerals though!”

Just need a space-rated vacuum truck. Managing the waste stream might be more difficult than the actual mining.

By: Ryan Lawson

Ryan Lawson — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 21:24:07 +0000

Try dropping a ball bearing into a bowl of jello, a bowl of sand and onto a piece of sand stone. Jello is a better analogy than sand because there is some cohesive gravity on a rubble pile but there is nothing cohesive in a bowl of sand. Maybe a bowl of wet sand is more appropriate?

Rubble piles will probably be much easier to mine for minerals though!

By: Andi

Andi — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 18:05:58 +0000

Is it possible that the asteroid will “eat” the impactor and then “ring” until it dissipates the excess energy?

By: Col Beausabre

Col Beausabre — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 07:51:31 +0000

So, the material is akin to dust on this planet Question Mark

By: Jeff Wright

Jeff Wright — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 06:16:54 +0000

A giant shotgun filled with phosphorus/Dragon’s Breath. Lots of airbursts. A nuke stand-off detonated with the fireball as wide as the impactor on contact may give a cupping shove. A penetration might give you a “fuzzy torus” where the energy rolls back onto itself-beware the blob!

By: John

John — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 03:20:12 +0000

This is hard to fathom, if the impactor’s energy is not transferred into the asteroid, then how does it slow down? Is there an exit crater on the other side? The rubble pile has low gravity and ridiculously low escape velocity, yet most of the ejecta has ludicrously low velocity and remains? I always ASSumed the rubble pile bodies formed by relatively low velocity accretion and probably by accreting other rubble piles. But who knows. Let’s repeat deep impact on one.

Anyway, what we all want to know, and the reason for the missions- what does it look like when a rubble pile slams into the Earth?