Nov 262009
Now THIS YouTube video was definitely worth the watch.
Something like this m ight be worth doing some day… truck a worthless rock into Earth orbit, grind it into a vast number of smaller rocks, then start seeding throughout the intended lanes of the ring system. Sure, it wouldn’t last long, geologically speaking…the perturbations from the Moon would quickly cause it to rain down out of the sky. Might only last a few hundred thousand years. But that’s long enough to take a few snapshots.
Wikipedia lists a few suggested Roche limits for Earth… for an “average comet” it’s between 17,880 and 34,390 km.
4 Responses to “Freakin’ Awesome: Earth with a ring system”
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Just to add some more hard science to the beautiful images:
http://www.astroscience.org/abdul-ahad/earth-ring-dynamics.htm
Moreover, since 1980 there has been discussions on the possibility that the Eocene termnal event (35 millions years BP) had been caused by the formation of a ring around Earth due to the breakup of a small asteroid, to which are attributed the numerous findings of tectites in North American location around that time strata. The elegance of the ring-hypothesis come from the fact that a ring would attenuate solar light by 30 per cent at the temperate latitudes during winter, just where the end of Eocene event shows marked temperature drop.
See here the abstract of the original 1980 paper http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1979BAAS…11..454O
Full paper is available (not free) on Nature site.
What effect would it have on a space program? Would the Moon become less interesting or more interesting as a result of having the wall of orbiting rock?
>What effect would it have on a space program?
It would both make a mess of it, and make it in some ways easier. A ring system, even a perfectly flat “Saturn-like” ring as shown in the video, would be a hazard to navigation. There is no such thing as a purely ballistic orbit that passess through the altitudes encompassing the rings that doesn;t at some point pass through the rings. So for low-thrust space propulsion systems, if you want to get past the rings, you have to plow through them.
But if you have a high thrust system, you could get aroudn them. Assume you launch into a parkign orbit that is inclined to the equator… 28 degrees or so, standard launch inclination out of Florida. Assume that the bottom edge of the ring system is 500 or more miles high. So you could orbit at 220 nautical miles without *too* much trouble (though you’d better be armored against a much higher micrometeoroid flux than LEO currently has). And if you want to go beyond the rings, wait until your orbit has taken you well north or south of them… then blast the hell out of Dodge onto a new orbit that goes beyond the rings without actually intersecting them.
On the other hand, if you have a low thrust system (ion engines), you can start in an equatorial parking orbit and leisurely spiral upwards to the ring system. Since you are accelerating at a slow pace, your velocity difference with ring particles at your same altitude will be quite low. You’ll still need to be well armored, but you could insert yourself into the rings with minimal risk. Once there, you could start collecting the ring particles to make… whatever you can make out of ’em. If the ring particles are ice, then you’ve hit the jackpot.
On the one hand, the hazards to navigation.
On the other, the view.
Frankly, I say we do it.
Jim