Vesta

[danbaron]

It looks to me like Vesta is a very big spinning rock which orbits the Sun.

Its mean diameter is 529 km (329 miles).

Its surface area is over twice that of California.

Its gravity is 0.022 g. So, there, you would weigh approximately 1/45th of what you weigh here. And you could jump approximately 45 times as high.

If you were walking on its surface, it might take you 20 years to explore it all.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/dawn-vesta-asteroid-photos/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4_Vesta

[zak]

amazing , and it is irregular,
if it is big enough then it will have a smooth and a more spherical figure.

[Charles Pegge]

Looks familiar.

NASA will not tell you about this! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3Golf34zPQ&feature=related


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers

[danbaron]

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It could have been taken inside Vesta, who knows?

Here, probably our equivalent of Clangers would be, "Baby Eating Robots from Iran".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iau_dozen.jpg

Do you notice anything strange about 2003 EL?

7364

[Charles Pegge]

The iron chicken might have laid it. Or maybe the soup dragon. It is a very large egg.

[danbaron]

You could absolutely make a base on Vesta. I think the worst part about it would be that the gravity is so low. In the general case, my suspicion is that very low gravity is bad for your health (similarly, so is very low pressure - what happens to climbers on very high mountains?). If you had an energy source, then, I think you could recycle your oxygen. The oxygen would become carbon dioxide. By inputting energy you could separate the two elements.

Who knows what kind of artificial environment you could construct beneath Vesta's surface? And, not just Vesta, but any of those 12 asteroids in the photograph. And, even more so, with so many of our solar system's moons. In my opinion, the gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, are impossible to use for bases, but, their moons are "a horse of a different color".

(It seems the whole world is entranced by the idea of colonizing Mars, but, if it was up to me, for sure, our Moon would be first.)

Anyway, back to Vesta, its mean diameter is 329 miles. So, its mean radius is 164.5 miles. The biggest cube you could fit inside it would have sides of 2*r*cos^2(pi/4), equaling, 164.5 miles.

Just for fun, say, inside Vesta, you made a cubic structure with 232 mile sides. And, say, that like a skyscraper, it had multiple floors. If, for instance, there was a floor every 10 feet, then, there would be, 5280*164.5/10 + 1 = 86857 floors.

So, the total floor space in the building would be, 86857*164.5^2 = 2,350,345,074 square miles.

We can approximate the Earth's surface area. Say the Earth's radius is 4,000 miles. The formula for surface area is 4*pi*r^2, equals 4*pi*16,000,000 = 201,061,930 square miles.

Therefore, Vesta's building would have 2,350,345,074 / 201,061,930 = 11+ times Earth's surface area.

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Incidentally, Vesta is just a big rock, I agree, but, if someone left us there with no means of propulsion except for our two legs, then, we would remain there.

From the Wikipedia article, its escape velocity is 0.35 km/sec. That equals 783 mph. There is no way that any human could launch himself off of Vesta's surface at that speed.

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There was a 1981 movie starring Sean Connery, "Outland". He was a federal marshal at a mining colony on Jupiter's moon, Io. It's the same idea, you're stuck on a big rock far from the Sun, which has no atmosphere.

Can you imagine using an asteroid for a penal colony (I guess like Australia)?

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My guess is that if any of those 12 big asteroids ever crashed into Earth, there would be a real problem for higher life forms.