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I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
With such a huge difference between peri- and aphelion, won't it be moving extremely fast when it's nearby?
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> The presence of natural satellites indicates this can indeed happen No, it doesn't, because natural satellites are generally not captured, and for those that are captured, the process involves interactions with other bodies.
The first hit when I search "planets capturing moons" says natural satellites generally are captured. "Most satellites of the outer solar system didn’t form with their host planets" https://astronomy.com/news/2016/12/captured-moons-of-the-gia... Even Triton, which is the size of a planet and in an almost circular orbit, is thought to be captured, the last I heard.
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You might but that is an incorrect pronunciation and the only time I’ve heard that (other than from people who aren’t into astronomy) was in elementary school and even then the teacher told us it was a common, but wrong, pronunciation.
A thread of people discussing pronunciations without saying where they are from or using IPA is a pointless waste of time. You may as well be talking about what time it is by posting “well, it’s dark here!”
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
Love the creativity! That said, the moon stabilized earth’s rotation angle, giving us the seasons, and it also drives huge chunks of life ecosystems and weather with the tides. So adding a second body in rotation to Earth with such superpowers would muck with a lot of stuff along the way. Maybe put it around Mars instead?
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Right! The Oberth effect for a smaller body is not as large as it would be for earth, but would still be non-zero.
"Non-zero" is the key word here. Oberth effect from fast flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligible.
Pretty sure the problem would be, rather, that a flyby of a body with low gravity would be negligibly fast (relative to your speed when not flying by). Oberth effect is because of high speed (a given increase in momentum gives more kinetic energy at higher speed than at lower speed) - it's just that dipping deep into a gravity well is the obvious way to get that speed.
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Well, since we’re just assuming we could meaningfully change it’s trajectory we might as well also assume we could slow it down!
Slowing it down would take way more energy than just nudging in a different direction. You might be better off trying to break it up into smaller pieces.
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
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Could you get a nice gravity boost away from the sun by just following it for as long as possible?
No, that's not how gravity boosts work. If you match speeds with an object you actually get zero boost. The point of a gravity boost is to come in pretty hot (relative to the body you're boosting off of) and then go out pretty hot in a different direction. So you take your relative velocity vector at the point of the encounter and twist it around. By doing that you change your orbital energy around your central body…
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
What sort of propulsion mechanisms (even those that are currently physically plausible but entirely outside our technology, so, for example, solar sails or nuclear torchships, but not, say, warp drive) could possibly be used to achieve such a task?
What this means is that if do you have a way to move it into a circular orbit around the sun, you could gain energy from the process, rather than having it cost energy. Maybe the best way to gather that energy, and possibly to move it as well, would be through gravitational assists, since they are lossless kinematic interactions. The energy gathered could then be used to build more of whatever is doing the interaction, exponentially speeding up the process.