Dwarf planet, asteroid
or steampunk Deathstar?
As every chubby kid will know, it's no fun being bigger than all the other children in the playground. So spare a thought for Ceres, the solar system's largest and roundest asteroid, which is so upset about being fat that it's crying watery tears way out in space. Boffins used Europe's infrared Herschel space telescope to …
A little leakage at the seals, I believe. They should fix that.
The water tanks have been inserted, the plug seals are in and the solar arrays are under construction. Once the arrays are complete, aimed and Ceres is inflated by steam pressure the Belters will have their Confinement Asteroid and us Flatlanders will be in for even more political strife.
>I feel sorry for my two oldest kids. Their middle name is Herschel.
Not sorry enough to have done anything about it when you had the chance, though? Did their mum come with non-optional frying-pan accessory, by any chance?
>Think they got over the "Your grandfather discovered Uranus" jokes by now.
Doubt it. I predict your comment history here ending abruptly on the exact date they figure out how to make it look like an accident.
>My youngest has "Madetoja".
Everyone who's had male offspring has made todger. That's no excuse to inflict it on their nomenclature.
>I'm not even gonna try to work it out.....
See your type? This Mumsnet web filtering is ALL YOUR FAULT, you know.
>(Yeah, I look like the icon. So what?)
I see no problem there, pretty snappy jerkin 'n' titfer if you ask me.
Water warm enough to turn easily into liquid would help to make belt mining feasible in the future.
Carrying energy is one thing, replacing volatiles is another - water isn't a great propellant but without a gravity well it becomes a lot more practical. Now add oxygen by electrolysis.
I hate the use of the word word sublime, the press along with armies of writers call many things sublime. except actual sublimation.
If we could move Ceres into a collision with say Mars . . . we could turn Mars into a water planet. Perhaps the energy of the impact would melt most of the ice.
I was thinking Venus. I read somewhere once that water precipitation helps scrub co2 from the atmosphere so Ceres could be all that's needed to terraform our red-hot sister if we could split it up and chuck it at Venus.
Although I imagine there's a little more to it than that...
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And here we see the entirely predictable cascade failure of nomenclature that renaming Pluto was bound to cause.
Why couldn't useless ground-bound "scientists" leave well alone? In my day Pluto was a planet, Ceres was an asteroid and there was no confusion nor bickering over what to call them. Everyone had their eyes set firmly on the prize of actually going out there for a first-hand look in a proper spaceship with fins and big rocket nozzles and stuff driven by a proper astronaut.
Then some idiot made computers cheap and astronomers took over the clubhouse and there went the future in a blaze of re-classification and ever-more-expensive telescopes. Anyone looking for a conspiracy need look no further than the De Grasse Tyson Illuminati and their insidious plan to bog down science and manifest destiny with the functional equivalent of stamp-collecting.
>BoP
>As every chubby kid will know, it's no fun being bigger than all the other children in the playground.
[Emphases mine]
You've obviously not peeked through the jail-bars of your local monkey enclosure lately if you think there's only one chubby kid per school.
[Icon: I know it should probably be the Grammarnazi one, but this seemed more fitting somehow.]
When I was young(er) there was a local show on TV about a bunch of puppets flying spacecraft and defending the earth. The main bad guy had his office in an asteroid so they could never find him. Obviously they weren't looking hard enough for puffs of smoke coming out of the asteroid when the cargo doors opened.
</nostalgia>