Trojans circling the Earth
As regular readers of the Weird Science Blog (all five of them) will know, the Moon was created billions of years ago when a Mars-sized planet smashed into the Earth.
Nicknamed Theia by astronomers, this mysterious world would have become a molten blob that cooled off to form Neil Armstrong's playground.
Earlier this year two identical spacecraft started looking out for remnants of this big bang.
The duo, called Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (Stereo), is having a gander at Lagrange points - areas where the sun's and Earth's gravity cancel each other out. Over time, asteroids and the like can end up in these 'wells', kept in a steady orbit.
And a new computer model indicates this is very likely to have been the case - and that moonlets called Trojans were left over from the collision.
These hunks of rock orbited the Earth for up to 100 million years before the planet shifted its orbit slightly thanks to the gravitational tug of its sisters in the solar system.
The Trojans would then have floated off into space or been destroyed by the Moon or our planet.
Weird Science Factoid: The can opener was invented 48 years after the can. That must have been a frustrating 48 years!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
In the 1980s I did some illustrations for a writer who proposed using the Lagrange points for space stations. Their purpose would be support nodes for space mining, and the theory behind it was that docking and transfer of materials in L points would be much cheaper than using the surface of the moon as a distribution point. The moon is a romantic object but has its own gravity well which creates problems and significant expense in landing and taking off again.
Your article makes me wonder if there aren't trojans that are large and stable enough to support the station facilities without having to construct them in freefall.
That's a fascinating idea and certainly makes sense. Imagine the kind of telescope you could build on a Trojan in a stationary position. Suppose you don't have those illustrations hanging about? Would love to see them!