beero1000
Veteran Member
Imagine you have an object with mass you want to move over astronomical distances, and which you can not encase or otherwise directly push, and which is also electrically neutral so magnets won't help either. I can think of one and only one way to move such an object: have it orbit another body (say an asteroid) and push *that* body so it's pulled along by its gravity. Am I missing an obvious alternative?
What's the hypothetical maximal acceleration you can give the asteroid-target object system without losing the target? I know you can't go beyond the asteroid's gravitational acceleration at whatever altitude you have your target in orbit, but is there a precisely calculable even lower limit above which the orbit deteriorates into a highly eccentric one so you still lose your satellite at its periapsis? Or is *any* amount of continued acceleration eventually going to lead to this? (Preliminary calculations using the higher theoretical maximum suggest that it would take at least 3.5 years to accelerate Ceres to 0.1c without pushing hard enough for loose rocks on its surface to be left behind, more if you want to keep something in orbit.)
What would be the energy requirements for accelerating an asteroid (let's not be skimpy, take Ceres, anything smaller than that and we're probably too slow to be of much use) at such a rate?
If tried to do some of the calculations with Wolfram Alpha, but I seem to get the wrong kinds of units in the result: I was expecting watts and got newtons for Ceres gravity * Ceres mass.
I'm considering the logistics of moving a wormhole entrance to an interstellar destination. I'm assuming macroscopic wormholes can be created and stabilised for all practical purposes indefinitely, but in their creation the laws and speed limits of causality in 3d-space still have to be obeyed: Or in other words, the shortcut through a higher dimension the wormhole represents cannot be used for its own creation. I'm also assuming that it is, partly for this reason, impractical to create the entrances more than a few light-seconds, light-minutes at most, apart, and the only way to get a useful interstellar wormhole is to move it conventionally. And since the wormhole doesn't know the difference between a ship, a container hull, and a planet surface, and will transport them all across indiscriminately, the only safe place for it is in orbit and the only safe way to transport is is to pull it gravitationally.
I don't think that that idea would work, any constant amount of thrust would eventually unbind the orbit. You might be able to get it to work by timing thrust pulses to specific points on the orbit that are calculated to maintain the system (like pumping on a swing). An alternative would be to not try to maintain an orbit, but just shoot asteroids by the wormhole one after the other. Each one would add some energy as it goes by.