When NASA's DART mission slammed into asteroid Dimorphous, it made a significant change to the orbital period of the asteroid moon. A single impactor will work well for some threatening space rocks, but if we have a few years, even larger asteroids can be brought under control. A new paper suggests that a centrifugal spinner be landed on the surface of an asteroid, harvesting local regolith and then using solar electricity to spin it up and off into space.
@fraser I've always said the best asteroid defense is to mine it out of existence. A catapult of some sort, spinner or coil gun would then be used to put the mined materials into orbits they can be captured from. Like this idea, the catapult can be used to redirect the asteroid out of harms way.
@fraser Neat. Newton's Third Law ftw. Makes me wonder if anyone has looked at using solar power to heat regolith enough to off-gas propellant for an ion engine, but I probably read too much sci-fi.
@joshsusser@fraser Use the solar power to vaporize the regolith, then controlled cool it into it's component molecules and atoms. Throw the waste overboard to redirect the asteroid. Place the good stuff into orbits it can be captured from.
BTW, one could make more solar panels, and the structures for more mining equipment from the mined materials. One then only needs to send more control modules, motors, etc to expand operations.
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