Kiley Price is a former Live Science staff writer based in New York City. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Slate, Mongabay and more.
In 2006, astronomers with the NASA-backed Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona discovered a peculiar body floating amid the sea of thousands of human-made satellites orbiting our planet. After taking a closer look, they determined that the object wasn't just another piece of space junk. Rather, it was a natural satellite that had been temporarily yanked into a tagalong orbit with the Earth, similar to the moon.
Stepping stonesIn September 2016, NASA launched the uncrewed OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on a mission to collect a sample from the potentially hazardous asteroid Bennu, which has a 1-in-2,700 chance of slamming into Earth in 2182. Seven years later, OSIRIS REx returned to Earth with a tiny chunk of the 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid.
Journeys to minimoons would take about 100 days to get there and back, research suggests. of kerosene fuel and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen just to get off the ground. "Going to Mars is a big, big step," he said."There's a lot of things that have to happen, so why don't we look at some of these near-Earth asteroids that are in between the Earth-moon system and Mars."
Currently, spacecraft have to carry all of the water and fuel they will need from Earth. The massive weight added by the liquid drives the"tyranny of the rocket equation," which states that as payload mass increases, so must the amount of propellant required to break free from Earth's gravitational pull.
"If you can access that water and leverage it, all of a sudden you have water to drink, you have oxygen to breathe and, more importantly, you have rocket fuel," Abell said. Robert Jedicke, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii and lead author of the 2018 study, suspects that many minimoons aren't water-bearing, because they may have either broken off from the moon or were pulled in from the edge of main asteroid belt, both of which suggest a low potential for water. However, other scientists, including Abell, think it could be possible. Binzel, for his part, is more optimistic, saying there's lots of uncertainty in the modeling.
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