Asteroid belt

“ From their previous remarks it was clear that the asteroids, those fragments of an exploded and once populated world, orbiting out beyond Mars, would be for them. Osmium, iridium, uranium. The rich, metallic guts of a planet exposed for easy mining. Thousands of prospectors, hopeful characters, and men brutalized by the life in space, were already drifting around in the Asteroid Belt. ”

“ Karin suggested: "There might be small ones, little bigger than asteroids. Let's put the pictures under the analyzer."
They did. The analyzer showed an asteroid belt four hundred million miles out from the center of the double star system. But none of the asteroids was apparently more than five miles in diameter.
"No planets," Jan reiterated. "And if there are any living creatures on those asteroids, I doubt whether they'd be close enough to affect us. It's pretty obvious that the forces holding us together come from the stars themselves." ”

“ It passed at a tangent ten thousand miles ahead of them, and Greg started work at the computer, feeding in the data tapes that would ultimately guide the ship to its goal.
Pinpointing a given spot in the Asteroid Belt was a gargantuan task, virtually impossible without the aid of the ship's computer to compute orbits, speeds, and distances. Tom spent more and more time at the viewscreen, searching the blackness of space for more asteroid sightings. But except for an occasional tiny bit of debris hurtling by, he saw nothing but the changeless panorama of stars. ”

“ The meteor or asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is "mined" by such adventurers as Thad Allen for the platinum, iridium and osmium that all meteoric irons contain in small quantities. The meteor swarms are supposed by some astronomers to be fragments of a disrupted planet, which, according to Bode's Law, should occupy this space. ”

“ As soon as the enormous airlock became visible down the shaft, he fired a laser cannon at it. Unable to resist an attack from within, the great door, thousands of years old, shattered into fragments. The atmosphere of the launching pad rushed out, hurling the shards of the airlock door into space. Kimball's ship then came through the tunnel and exited, followed in short order by the five other ships. They set a course for the Asteroid Belt and at top acceleration left the pirates' asteroid behind them.
After Gene had fled out of earshot, Zimbardo turned to the few men who were behind him. ”

“ Diane said.
He didn't either. But you never knew in the asteroid belt. It was next to impossible to thread a passage without a radar screen—and completely impossible with a radar screen on the blink and giving you false information. You could shut it off and pray—but the odds would still be a hundred to one against you.
"There!" Diane cried. "On the left! The left, Ralph—"
[Pg 61]
He saw it too. At first it looked like a jumble of rocks, of dust as the asteroid old-timers called the gravity-held rock swarms which pursued their erratic, dangerous orbits through the asteroid belt. ”

“ Recycling, salvage, ever-deeper mine shafts and tunnels, repeated sweeps of the Earth's sea beds and planetary and satellites' crusts, trenches, beds and craters offered insufficient returns. Scouring the Asteroid Belt, sifting the Kuiper-Oort regions, and intense competitions for substitutes provided inadequate and merely temporary relief. The solar community's population, on Earth and in space, had exploded to more than fourteen billion people. The search for substances to support humankind's needs ranged throughout ”

“ Not the really top-flight specialists, though, because the trip was too risky to send them. That was the third ship to try for Ganymede and the other two had cracked up on outer Jovian satellites that the observatories hadn't spotted from Earth because they are too small to show up in the scopes at that distance.
"When you get there you find there's practically an asteroid belt around Jupiter, most of them so black they don't reflect light to speak of and you can't see them till they hit you or you hit them. ”

“ The officers of interplanetary liners lose no love upon the meteor miners, claiming that their collected masses of metal, almost helpless, always underpowered, are menaces to navigation. Thad could expect nothing from the ship save a heliographed warning to keep clear.
But how came a rocket-flier here, in the perilous swarms of the meteor belt? Many a vessel had been destroyed by collision with an asteroid, in the days before charted lanes were cleared of drifting metal. ”

“ But actually, those chunks are all tens of thousands of miles apart, and the Belt looks just as empty as the space between Mars and Earth."
"Well, I don't see how we're ever going to find one particular rock," Tom said, watching the screen gloomily.
"It's not too hard. Every asteroid has its own orbit around the sun, and everyone that's been registered as a claim has the orbit charted. The one we want isn't where it was when your Dad's body was found ... it's been travelling in its orbit ever since. ”

“ Oritz Konig continued.
"The asteroid was discovered almost twenty years ago by an asteroid miner named George St. George. He's a loner, like so many of the asteroid miners. He makes a good living, but has no fixed address. He's constantly on the move and spends most of his time away from settlements in the Belt. He'll disappear for months, maybe a year or two-then show up on Ceres or in Eagle City with what he has found in the Belt and turn it into cash and supplies. Then he's gone again.
"Apparently he discovered this remarkable asteroid the pirates took over. ”

“ We had now reached a velocity of some twenty thousand miles a second.
“I shall hold it at that,” Dr. Weatherby said. “It’s too crowded in here, too dangerous.”
We traversed the asteroid region at about that rate. It was a tedious, tense voyage, so dangerous that for nearly five hours one of us was always at the tower window, to avoid a possible collision. The belt in here between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was thick-strewn with asteroids. But none came near enough to endanger us. ”

“ The asteroid would go around the earth in a series of ever-tightening ellipses, using Terra's gravity, plus rocket fuel, to slow it down to the right orbital speed.
When it reached the proper position, tubes of rocket fuel would change the course again, putting it into an orbit around the earth close to the space platform. It wasn't practical to take the thorium rock in for a landing. They would lose control and the asteroid would flame to earth like the greatest meteor ever to hit the planet. ”

“ I don't know anything more impressive to watch than a planet, even a little two-hundred-mile chunk of rock like this one, swinging up out of empty space and taking on size and form. White and round as a snowball, and spinning lazily like a snowball thrown through the air. This one was going to hit me right on the knob.
The twelve-hour rotation of the asteroid must have swung the spot past me three or four times before I paid any attention to it. A black smudge it was, round, but with ragged edges like a starfish. A jet scorch if I ever saw one. ”

“ The evolution of defense against nature had been steady and progressive, from the stone age, when prehistoric man sought shelter in caves from the pelting hailstones, to the present one in which they were about to whip out of its course a planet that was running wild through the solar system.
There in front of her, just outside the deadlight through which she was gazing, and silhouetted against the shining disk of the asteroid, was that terrible weapon, the generator of the disintegrating ray. In a few minutes, it would be hurling its mysterious beam across the void of space. ”

“ What would the effect be upon the earth's orbit, its climatic conditions, and its life? What might happen at the worst, the mind of man refused to conjecture. But it was admitted that, beyond peradventure, the best that could be hoped for would be that the asteroid itself might suffer annihilation—in which event, its shattered carcass would lie smothering a thousand miles of the earth's surface, changing the latter's axis and sending it staggering along a new orbit under conditions which might render human life upon the globe impossible. ”

“ Hoshino?" asked Richard. "Our time is short, very short indeed, if we have to manufacture, launch, and deploy the probes in time to locate and then destroy the asteroid. Even if we produce millions of probes, as you have said, we have millions of cubic miles of space to search through. In the time available, even trillions of the little probes can't help much. Theoretically, the asteroid can be anywhere. There are asteroids inside the orbit of Mercury and outside the orbit of Jupiter. ”

“ Wales felt a sharp, poignant emotion. He asked himself, as a world had been asking for five years, Why did it have to be?
There was only one answer. Far out in the dark lonesomeness of the solar system, far beyond man's new Martian colonies, the thousands of asteroids that swung in incredibly intricate and eccentric orbits—they were the answer. They had been shuttles, weaving fate's web.
Kendrick had been the first to see it, to note the one big asteroid whose next passage near Jupiter would make its eccentricity of orbit too great. ”

“ Gradually, the luminous discharge from Medusa increased in brilliancy until the planet became a ball of fire. Giant sheets of yellow light, like aurora streamers, drove off from its surface as the deadly ray bored against it until the asteroid resembled a vast volcanic eruption. Under the fierce blast from the Ring, its surface was melting away, and driving out into space a glowing mass of incandescent gas. ”

“ President, you're gambling with the very existence of life on Earth! If an asteroid forty miles long strikes Earth, it will not only cause the extinction of every life form on the planet, there is every likelihood that it will crack the Earth's crust! There will be no escape! No escape!! Don't you see that we have to cooperate with Zimbardo? It will be easier to meet his challenge once he has turned away the asteroid! ”

“ Let us see that we understand each other right. Unless I mistake you, your hypothesis is that a fragment of the earth, comprising the Mediterranean and its shores from Gibraltar to Malta, has been developed into a new asteroid, which is started on an independent orbit in the solar regions. ”

“ There is at least one in almost every patch. We use that as the core, and by planting a large gravity generator on it and feeding it a great deal of power, it and the asteroid attracts most of the nearby debris. The gravity generator has been souped up tremendously. It burns out rather quickly, but it operates long enough for our purposes. There is a respectable layer of assorted sizes of asteroids hugging the core. And there are several miles of dust surrounding everything. After the gravity generator has burned out, the big attraction dies out, of course. ”

“ A little calculation had shown that an initial velocity of thirty feet per second imparted to one of these chunks, moving at right angles to the radius of the asteroid, would, if the resistance of an almost inappreciable atmosphere were neglected, suffice to turn the piece of gold into a little satellite that would describe an orbit around the asteroid, and continue to do so forever, or at least until the slight atmospheric resistance should eventually bring it down to the surface. ”

“ If there are other materials present, things will fly. Medusa is about one hundred and fifty miles in diameter. It is scarcely conceivable that our ray could actually break it up. But I'm not going to take any chances. Medusa may be within range now. I think we had better try her at this distance."
Through their glasses, they could easily see that on one side the surface of the asteroid was pitted with holes and craters similar to those upon the moon, while the other, which had been subjected to the fierce erosion of the dense gases of the comet, was worn almost smooth and plowed into furrows. ”

“ Getting to the power plant through the complex here is the long way around, but we knew that we could do it and just couldn't take the time to look further on the surface for the shortest means of ingress."
"We'll have to find some way to open the airlock from the outside when we're not so rushed," responded Zip. "We haven't kept up with the time limit. What've we got?"
Madera sighed. "If we can't move the asteroid, impact with Earth will take place on Thursday, September 8, at 2:33 p.m. ”

“ But a minor planet—even the largest of the family—would not have the twenty-thousandth part of the earth's power to disturb a passing comet. At a distance of 200,000 miles a comet would pass such an asteroid without any marked disturbance of its motions," and at a distance of 1,250,000 miles there would practically be no disturbance at all. ”

“ Though there is this immense difference between a star and a planet, yet the observer must not expect to notice any such difference by merely taking a peep through the telescope. It was only the long exposure in the photograph that revealed the little body.
Such is the manner in which an asteroid is generally discovered in these latter days. A discovery like this comes as the well-earned reward of the skill and patience of the astronomical photographer. There are, indeed, a large number of known asteroids ”

“ Then it will catch up to the Earth and can easily be placed into an Earth orbit at that time. Scientists from Starlight Enterprise will live on it and try to learn its secrets. In fact, a ship will be launched from SE in a couple of days with a crew of them. They'll intercept the asteroid and start the exploration right away."
Mark continued bringing Joe up to date. "The Captain's got a team replacing the huge airlock on the surface of the asteroid, and the temporary power supply packets are being reloaded on the ships. We're in complete control of the asteroid now." ”