Recent content by Eric M. Jones

Dear StrayCatalyst As I said, it is all about the numbers. Nemesis passes the Earth at 50 kps on its way out to the Kuiper belt. Its eccentricity is 0.997, so getting to it is impossible. When it comes back, same deal. White paint or nukes won't affect it enough. The point of the story is...

>>If you can move earth, moving an asteroid is easy as pie. You need roughly the same velocity change for both, but the asteroid is lighter by a factor of at least 10000. There is no upper limit to an asteroid's size. That is the point of the story. The one in the story is 20% bigger than the...

>>Where is the point? Do you have some specific goal in mind? I am writing a fictional work where an asteroid that grazes the Sun and changes orbit to impact the Earth in about a century. The size of the asteroid precludes moving it or blowing it up. The ultimate solution is to move the Earth...

>MFB Thanks for the reply, but I don't really love the answer. If the Trojans were removed, HOW would the planet's orbit be affected? And which, the trojans or the greeks would move the orbit where? My guess is that if the trailing L point were emptied, the orbital R would increase (and...

Question: What would happen if a planet's trojans were removed or added to? And I don't mean "very little" please. What exactly would happen, for example, if a planet's huge trojan asteroids were pushed out of orbit into the Sun? What would happen if L4 and L5 had asteroids as big as the planet?

Thanks all for making me smarter. Eric

Thanks. The bubble of that thought came to the surface an hour ago.

>>The motion through the tunnel is not uniform accelerated. Isaac Newton said it was. >>Write the force acting on the falling body as a function of distance from the center, to see this. Okay F=ma. Gravity is considered to be simply a point in the center of the sphere. >>And for the...

I'm only guessing here, but is it possible that the 84 minutes minimum orbit time includes the Earth's rotation? I.E. Cape Canaveral has moved eastward by 8 minutes of rotation during the orbit time? If you shot up a satellite (to the east to gain velocity), then it would be 76 minutes, +8...

Mean Earth Radius=6.37 x10E6 meters a=9.8 m/sec/sec (-)s=1/2at^2 solve for t: t=19.00 minutes. (time for round trip...76 minutes) So what happened to the 8 minutes...(or the 6)? Eric

Clever guy that I am, I am writing a small paper on Celestial Mechanics...simplified...really really simplified. However, if I bore a tunnel through the Earth and drop a watermelon through it, the watermelon returns to my hand in 76 minutes. This is an example of an elliptical orbit of e=1 But...