h a l f b a k e r y"More like a cross between an onion, a golf ball, and a roman multi-tiered arched aquaduct."
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This would be a strategy for mining asteroids. Once you
have
started mining a small asteroid and you have a hole all the
way through, put the heavy loose residue material all at the
center of the asteroid so that gradually the asteroid will
start
to spin faster like a ballerina in a tuck.
The increased spin
will make it easier to get stuff off of the surface level.
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Annotation:
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Aren't asteroids solid to start with? Therefore mining the hole through will slow 'em down, and replacing the material will restore their speed. And anyway, how does the speed of rotation help the mining procress. |
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It doesn't help with the mining, but it does help with flinging stuff off towards where you want it to be (presumably Earth). |
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[Texticle]'s got a point with the solid thing, I think. Maybe... most asteroids (I believe) are potato-shaped. If you mine them and reorganize the bits so that they are more spherical then this might increase their rotation. That might work. Is that what you were getting at, [JHC]? |
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You can virtually jump off most asteroids, so why bother? |
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I was thinking that if you pulled more of the mass toward the center then the whole thing would spin around faster and it would be easier to get other stuff off the surface. Maybe, say if there were two kinds of metal on an asteroid and you only wanted one, you could melt one down into a heavy rod that ran right along the axis of rotation and thus speed the rotation up making it easier to fling the other off the surface. |
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If you scale it up you could do planets. |
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So... scaling it up further, if you put a colossal point mass at the centre of the galaxy, we could depart the galaxy more easily? |
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Now that's an sf story I'd like to .see. |
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I think the big problem with mining will be keeping the loose stuff under control. Think of gravel and windshields. |
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I think you would have to do quite a bit of reshaping away from the center of the rotational axis, like a ballerina or a skater switching to a tuck. |
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