I ran across a small newspaper article a month or so ago about the possibility of moving Earth into a larger/different orbit by managing the paths of comets or asteroids. Does anyone know the whereabouts of that actual article, or other sources of information regarding this idea?
Thanks,
sw

I recall this idea being discussed at the old board a few months ago.

There was a paper by Don Korycansky and others in Astrophysics and Space Science, 275, p 349-366. A 20 page PDF version of it can be found here, and the topic was also discussed in Scientific American as well as a number of newspapers.

As an aside, there is an obvious typo in the Scientific American article. They write of the 100 km object having a mass of 1016 tons, but I think they mean 10¹⁶ tons. Even so, I think the number is wrong. A 100 km diameter round object with mass 10¹⁶ tons would have a density of around 19 tons/m³. Even the density iron is less than half of that. They must have used a 100 km radius when they calculated the mass.

A search at Google on the name "Don Korycansky" will turn up a bunch of info. The url is: http://www.google.com

(Hmmm, edited because it wouldn't accept a hot link to Google without appending a bunch of other stuff to my code -- weird)


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Torsten on 2001-11-25 00:15 ]</font>