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Asteroid mining: disaster movie, or the shape of things to come?

As someone who made a very good program for orbital motion prediction pointed out to me, the total effect of asteroids on earth orbit is negligible in the short term (less than a few million years). And look at the situation now: we have no control whatsoever on asteroid/NEO motions yet. Near encounters with asteroids and comets send those rocks into random directions but the earth is so much heavier, that it doesn't matter. Actually this is the recent scientific criterion for what constitutes a planet which cost Pluto it's status: that a planet clears it's orbit from smaller bodies without getting affected. If significant amounts of material are artificially moved that change the path of a very light asteroid, the engineers have a lot of control when and where to send it.

25 Apr 2012

11:01 pm