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Subject: Space Watch

shadow27 23.06.18 - 10:16am
Streaky Bay Council (South Australia) has given the go ahead for a rocket launch that will splash into the Great Australian Bight.

Streaky Bay? Wtf. * +

shadow27 23.06.18 - 10:18am
Of all the places that we kick off our space race, the very last place I would have expected. I've been drunk under the jetty there before, tiny little fishing town. * +

cleancut 23.06.18 - 02:38pm

that's bo11ocks * +

obi_jon 23.06.18 - 05:08pm

Not exactly, but close. Whilst it's true that some asteroids could well be worth trillions if the rare and precious elements and minerals they potentially contain could be mined or extracted somehow but the technology needed to do that is still a looong way off. In fact it's not far past the science fiction/theoretical possibility stages at the moment. There is a current ESA mission which is on route to rendezvous with a nearby asteroid, where it will hopefully be attempting to collect and return a small sample of material from it back to Earth but to do this on an industrially viable scale would be, if you'll forgive the obvious pun, astronomical. * +

cleancut 23.06.18 - 05:16pm
the earth has more mass than all the asteroids combined, and contains more precious elements apart from iridium. most are just iron and nickel. not really worth it, using them to build stuff in space tho would be worth it. spaceships and that stuff * +

obi_jon 19.07.18 - 10:01am

@ cleancut - 23.06.18 - 05:16pm
the earth has more mass than all the asteroids combined, and contains more precious elements apart from iridium. most are just iron and nickel. not really worth it, using them to build stuff in space tho would be worth it. spaceships and that stuff

True enough, but resources of some vitally important elements like lithium and helium are rapidly running out, so things may change as global supplies dwindle. Plus they haven't figured out how to reliably identify which, if any, asteroids might contain enough of such precious substances that it would be worth the expense of going after them. They can detect traces of elements remotely using various spectrometry instruments but they currently have no way of knowing exactly what quantities of them they might contain, without physically visiting each potential target individually and taking material samples.
One article I read about this detailed various proposed ideas for future mining missions, including attempting to 'nudge' an asteroid's orbit by attaching maneuvering rockets to it and altering it's flightpath so that it becomes captured by the gravity of one of the other planets, likely either Saturn or Jupiter, and enters orbit around it. * +

obi_jon 19.07.18 - 11:32am
Uncolourized image taken by nasa's MRO(mars reconnaissance orbiter) earlier this year. The image of a strikingly blue coloured sand dune, formed on the dessert like surface at the bottom of the planet's Lyot crater, is a sight most people would never expect to see on the so called Red Planet.
* +

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