What propellant do the ion thrusters utilize?
I believe the energy it will take you to gather "comet dust" combined with the low specific impulse of ejecting "dust particles" will offset the viability of this concept.
Could you achieve a similar result by having a LCD panel (or something similar) that could be turned off and on to change the albedo over the surface of the asteroid? It's like the idea of painting the asteroid, but with more control.It removes the potential problems of gathering reaction mass with robots.
Quote from: MajorBringdown on 03/01/2011 04:23 pmCould you achieve a similar result by having a LCD panel (or something similar) that could be turned off and on to change the albedo over the surface of the asteroid? It's like the idea of painting the asteroid, but with more control.It removes the potential problems of gathering reaction mass with robots.Interesting idea. So long as the LCDs are using transparent solar cells on them to charge up the batteries, I don't see why that wouldn't work, off the top of my head. Of courseit occures to me to wonder if simply increasing or decreasing the spin of an asteroid or comet could aalter their course via gyroscopic precession? if so either process, either your LCDs or the Electron Beam units I meantioned before, could work, using less units, but a substantially longer time before impact. Anyway you look at it, I suspect that many smaller, lower powered units distributed over an asteroid or comet's surface, would have a greater and and more controlable effect than one or a few larger, high powered units.Jason
Quote from: JasonAW3 on 03/10/2011 03:51 amQuote from: MajorBringdown on 03/01/2011 04:23 pmCould you achieve a similar result by having a LCD panel (or something similar) that could be turned off and on to change the albedo over the surface of the asteroid? It's like the idea of painting the asteroid, but with more control.It removes the potential problems of gathering reaction mass with robots.Interesting idea. So long as the LCDs are using transparent solar cells on them to charge up the batteries, I don't see why that wouldn't work, off the top of my head. Of courseit occures to me to wonder if simply increasing or decreasing the spin of an asteroid or comet could aalter their course via gyroscopic precession? if so either process, either your LCDs or the Electron Beam units I meantioned before, could work, using less units, but a substantially longer time before impact. Anyway you look at it, I suspect that many smaller, lower powered units distributed over an asteroid or comet's surface, would have a greater and and more controlable effect than one or a few larger, high powered units.JasonI suspect you probably wouldn't need transparent solar cells. If the device was a square panel, and one half was solar cells and the other half some sort of panel that can change from dark to reflective, you would probably still be able to get a reasonable change in albedo if you had good enough coverage on the asteroid.Now, I'm just pulling this out of my backside. I haven't done any napkin math to confirm my idea.