Some asteroids aren't rocks.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
Quicksand in spaaaaaace!
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@futurebird You might get some vacuum welding too. So a brittle crust that you could break through by, say, stepping on it.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird
This is a fact that I haven't seen explored in most sci-fi stories with asteroids. It brings a new adversarial envrionment.. -
@futurebird You might get some vacuum welding too. So a brittle crust that you could break through by, say, stepping on it.
@RogerBW @futurebird that is pretty much what they found out when they sent that probe to take a sample of an asteroid. they are not necessarily very dense.
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@RogerBW @futurebird and get stuck, or rather it get stuck to you, as you too are a modest mass
Excuse you. Didn't your mother ever tell you *never* to discuss a lady's modest mass.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird *Lands on asteroid* SLORP!
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird "sinking" isn't the right word. "Penetrating" possibly: you're a projectile shooting into the asteroid, disrupting it.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird oh I'd hate to think of super high speed buckshot shells zipping around out there...
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@futurebird You might get some vacuum welding too. So a brittle crust that you could break through by, say, stepping on it.
@RogerBW @futurebird pushing off it, surely? You'd break the crust but achieve escape velocity doing it?
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird I doubt they'd have enough gravity for you to sink. It's probably more likely that you'd bounce off into space (very slowly).
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird this might be very beneficial for some sci-fi level asteroid mining, you don't have to do actual drilling but "just" turn the whole thing inside out somehow
until you can scoop up the good parts -
Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird Modest Mass will be my post-shoegaze future-core Modest Mouse disco cover band.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird best thread of the day.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
When the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected samples from the asteroid Bennu; the sample collection arm on the spacecraft sank about half a meter down before automatic lift-off was triggered: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-51928-4_83
So. Yeah.
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Some asteroids aren't rocks. They are rubble heaps. This makes sense when you think about it. These asteroids may have never been a part of a large terrestrial like body with gravity like earth. They are just loosely held together by their own modest mass.
For some reason I find this revelation creepy. I suppose I think about trying to land on the surface and just sinking ...
@futurebird given the velocities involved, it’s very quick sand indeed!
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@futurebird this might be very beneficial for some sci-fi level asteroid mining, you don't have to do actual drilling but "just" turn the whole thing inside out somehow
until you can scoop up the good partsQuite a while ago now; I was involved with a NASA mission plan called the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which would have demonstrated gravity tractor asteroid deflection as well as space resource utilization.
The plan was to pick up either an entire small asteroid or a boulder from a larger asteroid. To deal with even what looked like a single block potentially being only loosely held together, it would have been enclosed in a large bag to contain all the shed bits.
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