Also, I believe it is a much larger asteroid. They still hadn’t figured out how to even stop it from spinning.
Waiting for the inevitable story line where another accident or misjudgment send the asteroid on a collusion course with Earth, and Ed Baldwin dies heroically saving the planet.
Around 1.1 km.
The asteroid must have decayed from a near-Jovian Trojan orbit, which is why we haven’t been able to see it until now. Looks like it passed too close to Jupiter on its last go-around and was redirected into the inner solar system.
It appears to be coming in on an elliptical Mars-crossing orbit. Looks like it’s about 1.1 kilometers in diameter. Not huge as these things go. And based on our orbital analysis of its moon, the density of the asteroid is seven grams per cubic centimeter.
I half expected the disgruntled Helios workers to start chanting beltalowda.
It’s a silly show, but I’m still finding it entertaining. Ed Baldwin is a menace, but I’m liking Kinnaman’s acting. Wrenn Schmidt is terrific too, imho.
It probably shouldn’t surprise me, because actors by definition are adept at portraying people that they are not in reality, but… Wrenn Schmidt is incredibly beautiful. They age her with makeup and possibly prosthetics to play Margo in the later seasons. But if you look up Wrenn Schmidt, the actress, you’ll see. Kind of girl you fall in love with whether you want to or not.
And we are back to the heart of the show–bad choices with a body count.
Just finished S4E8.
So the difference between a transfer orbit to Earth and a stable orbit around Mars is a 5 minute longer burn while “pushing” a 1.1km diameter rock. Good to know.
And at the same time they can only control the burn remotely through a convoluted technological kludge!
I think about how NASA is so inefficient because of all the politicians insisting on carving off pieces of work to be done in their own district when voting for funding. This asteroid theft is the same thing.
So who’s going to bite the big one in the final two episodes? Ed (highest odds), Margo (high odds), Miles (medium high odds), Lev (low odds), Eli (dark horse).
My guess is Kelly. That whole shot of her at the crater was wasted screen time…unless it was foreshadowing.
But it should be Ed. He’s now just a weight to the story that should be shed.
Yeah, I was half-seriously thinking they would miscalculate and crash it on her.
Ed is reading The Sand Pebbles to a nervous kid as a bedtime story???
Maybe the brothel scenes will calm him down. Or the part where they slice up a live man, prompting his friend to shoot him out of mercy. Or was all that just in the movie?
“I’m going to need you to open this box, but I’m only going to check the very first item that is on top.”
So it’s come to this: A For All Mankind heist episode.
I guess Ed will make some editing on the fly…
This season just keeps getting worse and worse. I chatted with a neighbor a few days ago and he asked if I had AppleTV and was mentioning various sci-fi shows. He is currently in S2 of For All Mankind and was really loving it. I didn’t want to spoil anything but I so badly wanted to warn him to just stop after S2. S3 is okay-ish but don’t even watch S4. It’s just bad.
I hope Ed doesn’t die or give his life heroically in some half-assed redemption. I hope Ed is arrested, tried, and sent to prison for the rest of his life. I hope his entire legacy and reputation is destroyed.
I’ve been binging season four since yesterday and am on the sixth episode. What was the appeal of the first asteroid they tried to capture? I think someone described it as “carboniferous.”
I think it was mostly practice for the techniques. But primitive asteroids in general have a higher percentage of precious metals and rare earth elements than the Earth’s crust in bulk. As in, a random handful of carbonaceous chondrite would have more than a random handful of Earth dirt. So a sizable carbonaceous chondrite would be useful if you had the technology to melt the whole thing and sort through the atoms. But no asteroid is likely to have concentrations of useful elements higher than in ore deposits on Earth. (ETA, well, except for iron and nickel.) Concentrated ores take generations of melt cycles on a geologically active planet to form, and no asteroids were geologically active long enough for that to happen (even those that did differentiate into a metal core and stony surface).
Other examples of carbonaceous asteroids in our solar system include Phobos and Deimos, which are already conveniently orbiting Mars.
Thanks. Something else I wondered about is just how long was Danny Stevens isolated in the North Korean capsule?
It must have been months to get a resupply mission to them.
They said they were going to put it into Mars orbit and mine its valuable resources in order to grow out Happy Valley.