Will NASA's Dawn spot ALIEN LIFE on asteroid belt dwarf world Ceres? After seven years, and more than three billion miles of travel, the Dawn spacecraft has been captured by the gravity of the Solar System's dwarf planet Ceres. The NASA probe entered a stable orbit at 0439 PST (1239 UTC) on Friday. "We feel exhilarated," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission at the …
Dawn carries less than a tonne of liquid xenon, and wouldn’t have been able to reach Ceres using rocket fuel: launching all that material in space would be too expensive.
I would think that using traditional fuel thrusters would have gotten it there, just nowhere near as quickly. The increase in efficiency is wonderful, though. If engineers can continue to improve upon it, we may end up with an engine that can get us across the universe using no fuel whatsoever. To preempt the naming war that will inevitably spring up around such an invention, I dub it the Jireček drive.
Planetary Resources talks about mining asteroids. This one is the mother lode. 2.8 million square kilometers of surface area covered in high grade platinum group metals ore, endless water, 0.03 G surface gravity, immense caves for habitation, premade steam volcano to drive a turbine. As Dawn gets closer we will see much more.
It is a far better habitat for a colony than Mars. A bit far - twice as far as Mars - but Musk is sorting out the quick and inexpensive trip.
Whoever winds up owning this thing will have more wealth than anybody ever before.
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