Posted on 02/04/2017 4:20:04 PM PST by BenLurkin
For 10 days this month, OSIRIS-REx will investigate whether or not Trojan asteroids exist at certain points in Earth’s orbit called Lagrange points. Though Jupiter has Trojan asteroids, it’s unclear whether or not Earth’s Lagrange points host similar objects. After all, only one Earth Trojan has ever been found.
“The Earth orbits around the Sun, and the Earth has a gravitational field and the Sun has a gravitational field,” explained Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS REx’s principal investigator. “Because of that property, there are certain points in space where those two fields balance each other out, called Lagrange points.”
OSIRIS-REx will be tuning its instruments to search for trojans at two Lagrange points called L4 and L5, which are stable enough that asteroids could feasibly exist there. These points are located 60 degrees ahead of and 60 degrees behind the Earth in its elliptical orbit around the Sun.
A lot of research regarding Earth’s origins focuses on meteorites. But most of the meteorites on Earth hail from the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Looking at the trojan asteroids our planet shepherds might provide a more accurate snapshot of the material our planet formed from.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
If I didn’t know better Osiris-Rex looking for Trojans. This could be the opening scene of an old sword & sandal movie or porno flick!
Someone at NASA clearly had a sense of humor when they wrote that press release.
Seems to me that the moons gravity would cause these points in space to wobble a bit.
True?
False?
You will probably need Trojans, because, as some of you may already know about Lagrange, They got a lot of nice girls...
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We have the whole planet to examine; we know what the planet is formed from.
This sounds like fake ‘science’ for someone to wrap a grant around.
Snuff it!
Awesome.
.
Obviously they would advance and retard in elliptical fashion. probably a very small ellipse.
The L4 and L5 Lagrange points are each 93 million miles from Earth. The same as the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The influence of the moon’s gravity at that distance is not very great
So if it's on the earth's orbital path, a Lagrange point would be at the vertex of a (mostly) equilateral triangle with the earth and sun at the other vertices.
Therefore at a Lagrange point, the force from the earth's gravity would be much smaller than from the sun, and the net gravitational vector would point mostly toward the sun.
So it can't be that the gravitational forces "balance each other out" there. It must be some sort of a stable point for solar orbit.
“Looking at the trojan asteroids our planet shepherds might provide a more accurate snapshot of the material our planet formed from.”
Nice sentence structure ...
Also could host long term research/mil outposts.
“from which our planet formed”
You’ll need a 10 to get yourself in,too!
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Ah, the hours of my youth wasted... :)
I wish I had the money, both US and UK, that I wasted on that game back in the 80s.
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