h a l f b a k e r yOn the one hand, true. On the other hand, bollocks.
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From the linked idea comes a proposal to give the Moon Saturn-like rings, using vacuumed-up moondust.
However, planetary ring structures and stablity are poorly understood, though it is thought that many tiny moonlets act to maintain the structure.
To this end, I propose orbiting golf balls around
the Moon, named in honour of its first golfer.
See [theleopard]'s anno.
Broom_20the_20Moon
[coprocephalous, Jun 02 2009]
Shepherd moons
http://en.wikipedia...wiki/Planetary_ring
[coprocephalous, Jun 02 2009]
Planet You
Planet_20You
Own your own planet for $100. I always thought this was one of my best ideas. [xenzag, Jun 02 2009]
The Soundtrack
http://www.allmusic...sql=10:3ifexqt5ldfe
Shepherd Moons, by Enya [neutrinos_shadow, Jun 03 2009]
[link]
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//some of us may have missed [Awol]'s subtle (vacuum based) joke// |
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I didn't miss it. It just sucked. |
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This idea is great, especially because there is so much more that Humanity can do to add to the space garbage already in orbit of Earth. |
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[Jinbish] It was a joke, wasn't it? |
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I thought of it as a way of finding a use for golf balls. |
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//how hard would you have to hit a lunar golf ball to put it in orbit?//
About one sixth as hard as you would have to hit it to put it into Earth orbit. |
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Not as hard as if you were on Earth... |
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Right. Well. Assuming a circular orbit, with Kepler's & Newton's shenanigans, there's a F=Gm1m2/r.r equated with F=m.v.v/r and a little bit of jiggery pokery. Unfortunately, I can't remember any more of my school physics. |
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Yes [Paulo], there's definitely a lack of seriousness in there somewhere! And I have to admit to wanting to throw in a pun too. |
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Even though I don't play golf, I admit it should be awesome to play it on the moon. I mean, if they could slim those spacesuits down a bit. At least enough so that you could swing a golf club. But imagine, without air drag and with only a sixth of Earth gravity, those golf balls could go pretty far. Maybe enough so that they would have to forbid golf playing inside flight paths. |
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You can't put a golf ball into orbit by hitting it from the surface of the moon. If it doesn't escape to infinity, it'll be in an orbit which intersects the moon's surface, so at some point it'll hit the ground. |
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To get into orbit you need to perform a "circularising" manoeuvre when the ball has reached the right altitude. |
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No, [Wrongfellow] is right, any ballistic orbit will include it's starting point, so you need to Tee off in a tower and then take down the tower. The lack of atmosphere should allow a highly eliptical orbit with an apogee of a few feet. |
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Won't work, I'm afraid. Orbits are ellipses (assuming the parent body is a point mass, which I think is reasonable for this discussion) and an orbiting body can only move from one possible ellipse to another through the application of an acceleration. |
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So if you accelerate the body from ground level, it will always end up moving on an elliptical path which intersects the ground, no matter what angle you accelerate it at. |
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To put a body into a genuine orbit, you have to get it onto an elliptical path that doesn't intersect the ground at any point, and so the final application of acceleration must necessarily happen far from the ground. |
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Or another way to look at it is that Newtonian mechanics is fully reversible. Imagine the time-reversed equivalent of your scenario: a body in a stable circular orbit which suddenly decides to plunge parabolically groundwards. Why did it do that? It can only do that if you apply a force to it. |
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//I didn't miss it. It just sucked.// |
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I'm glad I came back to this idea. I missed the humor in that response the first time. |
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I am afraid [Wrong...] and [MrQ...] are correct. There is also the problem of Earth being a little too big and a little too close. |
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However, if you are amenable to ribbons of dust, this might work. |
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The orbit decays because it's not in a perfect vacuum; it's being prodded and poked by molecules of air. |
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The time-reversal of a satellite's orbital decay is a situation where those stray air molecules etc are colliding with it in just the right way to gradually speed it up and boost it into a higher orbit. |
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Theoretically possible, but in practice entropy is against you. |
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(And herein lies a very interesting question: if physics is perfectly reversible, where does the "arrow of time" come from?) |
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[Wrong...] Call SuSy, she's got one of the answers. |
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I completely misread this - I thought it would be some invention loosely based around the idea of Alan B. Shepard showing his bottom. |
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{Now I can only think of "Sleeping Satellite" by Tasmin Archer} |
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There is another force available which could, in theory, circularise the orbit - the Earth's gravity. It would be a particularly tricky three-body problem, and a damn tricky shot. |
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Which gives me an idea... |
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//Now I can only think of "Sleeping Satellite" by Tasmin Archer//
I think you can get counselling on the NHS for that. |
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