Re: [GZG] Asteroid fields and the Great Monkey Dance :-D (was: Re: The Great Premeasuring Monkey Dance

On Friday 08 May 2009 12:23:25 Indy wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Samuel Penn <sam@glendale.org.uk>
wrote:
> > So far, none of the probes sent through the asteroid belt by
> > NASA have had any real ability to detect and avoid asteroids,
> > and they didn't hit anything. I seem to recall that the closest
> > any came to anything sizable was in the order of hundreds of
> > thousands of km, but I can't find a reference for that.
>
> In support of Sam's comments, I had posted the following to the list
> about 8 years ago, and again some years before that. Given the number
> of <ahem> "new" listers since then, probably time to repost it. :-)

<snipped lots of good stuff>

Thanks Indy :-)

Another perspective: The total mass of all asteroids between Mars and
Jupiter is estimated to be about 4% of the mass of the Moon.

If you did want something exciting, then you could have a couple
of recently collided asteroids, or a broken up comet, which might
give you a reasonable density across a table top. Fragments probably
wouldn't be large enough to block line of sight except at small
scales however.

AFAIK, even famous meteor showers like the Perseids are little more
than grains of sand plus a few small rocks.

Depending on scale, a world with a few moonlets might work as well
(at 1" = 1000km, which IMO gives nice sized planets, the Earth-Moon
system would need a very big table top, at least ~400" across).

Anyone got any good (realistic) ideas for FT terrain?

So far, I've only ever used a planet with a gravity well.

-- 
Be seeing you,			       http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.			    Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@glendale.org.uk 
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