Asteroid Capture Plan of the Day: Researchers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University have just published a paper explaining how a near-Earth asteroid could be pushed into Earth’s orbit.
While the thought of directing an asteroid toward Earth sounds kind of scary, the idea is that some of these near-Earth objects could be captured in Earth’s orbit for study and mining.
The paper proposes some candidate asteroids for capture, including a 30-foot wide object called 2008EA9 that will pass less than a million kilometers from Earth in 2049, and has an orbital velocity similar to ours. A tiny nudge could knock it into orbit about twice as far away as the moon.
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