The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it's always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn't received much attention over the years.
But, if you're retired and have an underlying interest in researching space habitats, developing a detailed plan for turning an asteroid into one seems like a great use of time.
And that is precisely what David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, recently did. He released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat.
Fully diving into the report's details would be far beyond the scope of this article, but we can hit the highlights. Dr. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories – asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use). Let's tackle each of them in turn.
Asteroid selection focused on which asteroid would make the best candidate to be transformed into a rotating space habitat. Considerations for this part include what the asteroid is made of, its proximity to Earth (and "delta-V," i.e., how much energy it takes to reach), and its overall size. READ MORE...
Most asteroids that have impacted Earth were discovered many years, often many millions of years, after the event. The evidence? Roughly 200 known craters scar Earth’s surface, telling an impactful story of how our planet, and life on it, has been dramatically shaped by violent collisions with ancient space rocks. On occasion – five in human history, to be precise – we discover an asteroid before it strikes.
At 19:24 UTC on March 11, 2022, astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered a bright and fast-moving new object in the sky using the 60cm Schmidt telescope at the Piszkésteto observatory, Hungary. He collected four observations in quick succession, and just 14 minutes later reported his findings to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), initially designating the object ‘Sar2593’.
The results were quickly published and used by automatic impact assessment systems around the world to estimate the possibility of an impact: at the time, it seemed unlikely, at less than 1%.
Krisztián continued to observe the object, making a further 10 observations soon after the discovery and again submitting them to the MPC. These, however, resulted in an entirely different scenario. Almost exactly an hour after it was detected at 20:25 UTC, ESA’s “Meerkat” monitoring system triggered an alert to the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) based on the accumulated observations. READ MORE...
