Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
 |
Comments on Gravity Tractor Research By British Scientists
It would take some planning and advance tracking, but a gravity tractor might actually work. (Read
the complete story)
| "Can I ask why you wouldn't just turn the spaceship around, and push the thing off course? I think it's great to think about these things and come up with cool ideas, but this one doesn't seem too practical..." ( 9/4/2009 9:39:52 AM) |
| "It depends on the consistency of the asteroid. Some asteroids run on the light side - they're porous, a bunch of small masses barely fused, or a clump of gravel bound by their own meager gravity. A pushing rocket may blow right through it. The gravity tug would be a good choice for that type of situation. " (Joe the Rat 9/4/2009 10:15:59 AM) |
| "Pushing is also very hard to do effectively as the asteroid is spinning. You want to push consistantly in one direction which you you can't do if you're attached to a spinning opject. The GT allows the object to spin and a constant force along the velocity vector to be applied over a long period. Also, power issues could arrise from eclipse periods on the surface etc. And it's no mean feat to land and anchor a spacecraft to an asteroid with a very low gravity field..." (Craig B 1/7/2010 6:45:06 AM) |
| "Pushing celestial bodies has a long descriptive history in sf. Take a look at this description of planetary propulsion blast technology in Edmond Hamilton's 1934 classic 'Thundering Worlds'." (Bill Christensen 1/7/2010 9:42:26 AM) |
| "Also, Robert Heinlein gives a long description of first stopping an asteroid from spinning and then slotting it into a specified orbit in his 1940 novella 'Misfit'." (Bill Christensen 1/7/2010 9:46:15 AM) |
Get more information on Gravity Tractor Research By British Scientists
Leave a comment:
Please send your comments to @technovelgy and I'll post them. Thanks!
More Articles
Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?'
Will An AI Found A New Religion?
'You must decide how you will worship Me.'
Terraformer Industries Make Methane
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
AIs Turn Marxist Under Bad Management
'It was a general strike of the robots...'
Moscow Attacked By Hundreds Of Drones
'It hurtled on down with inconceivable speed until it was visible as thousands of tiny robot planes...'
Nifty Folding Electric Bicycles!
'Separate paths were provided for them...'
