This is cool. I’ve thought for years that we should be spending a lot more time and money investigating the asteroid belt than we spend sending missions to planets. To me it’s all about practicality. It is easier to explore the asteroid belt because it’s closer, there’s more to go see and the gravity wells involved are tiny so we can move around. But more importantly, WE CAN USE THEM AS RESOURCES TO STOP RAPING THE EARTH!!!
Cool story:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — NASA’s Dawn spacecraft rocketed away Thursday toward an unprecedented double encounter in the asteroid belt.
The Dawn spacecraft will travel 3 billion miles to explore the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Scientists are hoping Dawn will shed light on the early solar system by exploring an asteroid and a dwarf planet.
It is the world’s first attempt to journey to a celestial body and orbit it, then travel to another and circle it as well. Ion-propulsion engines, once confined to science fiction, are making Dawn’s trip possible.
“To me, this feels like the first real interplanetary spaceship,” said Marc Rayman, chief engineer. “This is the first time we’ve really had the capability to go someplace, stop, take a detailed look, spend our time there and then leave.”
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThere may be more to explore, but we might have to send seperate missions to each asteroid. It’s not all that easy to zip from one to the other – it requires solar orbital changes, which take fuel and travel time. But you’re right that it’s easier than breaking out of a planet’s gravity well, then doing the solar orbital change. I’d have to play around with the relative dV involved.
BTW, I think the Earth will have plenty of resources (of the type we can find in space anyway – metals and rocks) for a loooooong loooong time. Our deepest mines are barely scratches in the surface of the crust. Furthermore, a lot of the solar system is poor in the types of heavy metals you can get easier on Earth. Mining is not all that invasive either, unless you’re talking about strip mining coal (which doesn’t exist in space).
Coal isn’t the only thing strip mined. You should see some of the zinc mines in Colorado and Utah. Other metals are also mined in destructive ways.
But you are quite literally correct when you say we have “barely scratched the surface.” Our deepest mines are probably comparable to digging through the peel of an apple in terms of how much actual “earth” we’ve exploited.
Yes, I know there’s a lot of delta-vee involved in moving from asteroid to asteroid, but that’s the beauty of the ion engine that this probe is using. It may take a while, but we can scout around a bit.
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