When human civilization leaves the earth in the future, it may not only land on the monotonous moon or desolate Mars, but also have the opportunity to live on asteroids. A team at the University of Rochester recently proposed a study that does not violate the laws of physics at all, but is very strange: hollowing out an asteroid and using artificial gravity to turn the asteroid into a rotating space city.
Human beings’ motivation to explore the universe continues to increase, but the cold, dark, and weightless environment also makes it more difficult for humans to build a space base. Scientists have proposed many space colonization methods, some of which are in line with today’s technology, and some are unconstrained.
There is a cosmic colony concept called O’Neill cylinder (O’Neill cylinder), also known as O’Neill colony (O’Neill colony), which consists of 2 counter-rotating cylinders, which can counteract the gyroscopic effect and produce artificial Gravity, in theory, is equivalent to the size of a city for humans to live permanently.
In order to reduce the cost of transporting materials for the construction of O’Neill’s cylinder, the University of Rochester team proposed a “very theoretical” paper: hollow out a sufficiently hard asteroid, rotate it, and use centrifugal force to generate 0.3 G gravity, then build cities inside spinning asteroids. Of course the interior would be dark, but the outer rock would protect people from harmful space radiation.
▲ Asteroids can also become human space habitats. (Source: pixabay)
However, most of the asteroids in the solar system are not hard rocks, but huge rubble piles formed by the weak aggregation of various rocks of various sizes by their own gravity. If such asteroids are hollowed out and rotated, the ” ground” would drift into space and dissipate.
Fortunately, the University of Rochester team has a solution to this, just put the asteroid in a cylindrical bag slightly larger than the asteroid itself, made of ultra-light and ultra-strong carbon nanofiber mesh.
The team decided to model an asteroid with a radius of 300 meters (such as Bennu asteroid) as a test object. First, the asteroid was wrapped in a flexible and elastic nanofiber web, and then the asteroid began to rotate, and the debris began to flow out. scattered and thrown into space along a tangential direction.
▲ Free download (Source:NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
As the asteroid spins up to the speed required for artificial gravity, the loose debris clings to the outermost fiber web under centrifugal force, at which point engineers begin to expand the fiber web outward to tautness in a controlled manner , in the end, an asteroid only 300 meters in size can create a cylindrical space habitat with a living area of 56.9 square kilometers, which is equivalent to the size of the city of Manhattan.
Of course, humans still need to launch some building materials to make life support systems, fences, etc., to enrich this barren rocky ring. No one will build asteroid cities in the short term, but the technology required to complete such projects will not violate any laws of physics. Space cities still seem sci-fi at the moment, but history shows that, in as little as a century, the rapidity of technological progress can make the impossible possible.
The new paper was published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space.
(First image source: University of Rochester)
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