Author Topic: 2016 HO3 is a quasi satellite of earth - 40m to 100m Apollo Asteroid  (Read 53744 times)

Offline Robotbeat

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Except SpaceX isn't setting records by landing Dragon on the Moon, and it doesn't test out the kind of conditions they want. For the same amount of money, they could do another Mars landing attempt.

Which is what I think they'll do.
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Offline bad_astra

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There's a good reason for anyone wanting to colonize mars to take an interest in asteroids first, namely Phobos. You couldn't ask for a better way-station for Mars, for more reasons than I will go into here. Phobos makes doing Mars easier. And if you want to size up opreations on Phobos while getting to know it better why not pick the easiest NEO you can find as a test.

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Offline RonM

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There's a good reason for anyone wanting to colonize mars to take an interest in asteroids first, namely Phobos. You couldn't ask for a better way-station for Mars, for more reasons than I will go into here. Phobos makes doing Mars easier. And if you want to size up opreations on Phobos while getting to know it better why not pick the easiest NEO you can find as a test.

Looks like BFS will do a direct EDL on Mars. Since BFS isn't stopping in Mars orbit before landing, Phobos can wait.

A mission to 2016 HO3 is a good idea, but it doesn't fit with what we know of SpaceX plans.

Offline Bynaus

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There must be some variant of Godwin's law in force around here requiring that in each thread, sooner or later, we will end up discussing the SpaceX Mars plans... :)

Seriously though: When looking for updates on the object (which is now officially called (469219) 2016 HO3) from the last few months, I found this study (seems to be a conference abstract):

http://www.aiaahouston.org/Horizons/Earth'sPseudo-MoonR0.pdf

So: minimum dv = 6.3 km/s (mainly because of the significant inclination) and a round-trip time of about a year. Not a very accessible object then, 2000 SG344 is much better in that respect.

Article in MNRAS (paywalled): https://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/462/4/3441

And look here for new citations of the article in the scientific literature: https://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/crossref-forward-links/462/4/3441
« Last Edit: 09/07/2016 08:10 pm by Bynaus »
More of my thoughts: www.final-frontier.ch (in German)

Offline Ludus

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« Last Edit: 11/11/2017 02:36 pm by Ludus »

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