In a Relatively Short Time, It Might Be Possible To Transform An Asteroid Into A Space Station.

It would not be simple to construct a big space station where hundreds of thousands or even more people could live. Even after construction, the inhabitants would face two serious health problems: the effects of the low gravity on their bodies, and a great number of cosmic radiation. A daring solution to these issues is offered in a recent, unreviewed paper: construct the space station inside an asteroid and start it spinning.

David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, has presented the concept, which provides a fairly extensive overview of what would be required to implement it.

Importantly, the asteroid might be converted into a space station in just 12 years for as little as $4.1 billion by deploying self-replicating robots. When compared to big space missions, which this is without a doubt, that amount is low.

For the time being, let's disregard the robotic needs. Finding a suitable asteroid that could be used as a space station was Jensen's first task. Atria was the asteroid he chose. This Near-Earth Object never travels in the plane of our planet's orbit. It is built of stone and is 4.8 kilometres (3 miles) across. Even the moon, a little body measuring around one kilometre (0.6 miles), is present.

The "Atria" family of asteroids, which consists of only 20 objects with orbits entirely within the Earth's orbit, includes 2019 LF6. With a diameter of roughly 1 km (0.62 miles), 2019 LF6 circles the Sun every 151 days, occasionally travelling a little further than Venus and occasionally moving closer to Mercury.

Quanzhi Ye, a postdoc at Caltech, Professor Tom Prince, of JPL, and George Helou, both at Caltech, co-discovered the object. "You don't find kilometer-size asteroids very often these days," Quanah Ye remarked.

"People first organized systematic asteroid searches thirty years ago, discovering larger objects first, but now that most of them have been discovered, the bigger ones are rare birds," Ye added. "LF6 is very unusual in size and orbit; its distinctive orbit explains why such a big asteroid evaded careful searches for several decades."

The Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, an instrument at the Palomar Observatory that can quickly scan the sky for things that shouldn't be there, made the discovery of the item. And since they can only be found in the first hour after sunset or just before sunrise, that information is vital for finding new asteroids in the Atria group.

In the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, ZTF has so far discovered around 2,000 new asteroids and 100 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The group is hoping that Twilight will discover additional Atria items soon. They also hope that NASA will proceed with NEOCam, a proposed mission that will find many more NEOs and determine whether or not they constitute a threat to Earth.

Everything, including the solar panels and the station itself, would be constructed out of materials found on the asteroid. Jensen decided on a torus structure, which has a donut-like form. Multiple levels might be constructed on the interior of the donut, providing protection from various threats like radiation and micrometeorites.

Atria rotates every 3.4 hours, but this would need to be sped up significantly to give the people living in this ringed station near-Earth gravity. It would have to make one rotation every 105 seconds with a radius of just over 2.1 kilometres (1.3 miles).

The cost and schedule are now just approximate estimates, but they are based on a vital robotic detail: deploying robots that can construct every part of the space station, from solar cells to habitation modules, using materials found on the asteroid. Other robots would be included in this, making the first set dispatched as small as feasible.

Once the reformation is complete, these robots might easily relocate to different asteroids and begin the process over again.

Since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, this has been a common dream. Plans may not always work out, but this notion is unquestionably a step in the right direction.