Many will remember the series The Expanse in which civilization is populating Ceres, the dwarf planet located in the asteroid belt and Mars , our next destination, for quite some time. While it is true that NASA is planning to build an outpost on the Moon and manned missions to Mars seem not far behind, a team of scientists points to Ceres as the best destination to have humans living outside of Earth. It is a very creative proposal.
Why is Ceres interesting?
It really has a few cool features. It is located in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. It measures 952 kilometers in diameter and is the only dwarf planet closest to the Sun. Named after the Roman goddess of agriculture, crops and fertility, its surface is composed of a mixture of water ice and various hydrated minerals and makes Not many years were water vapor emissions detected from different regions of the dwarf planet. It even hides an underground ocean of salt water and could have other water reserves, raising hope that it may have been habitable. This, added to the fact that it still has geological activity, means that Ceres is still an active world and could continue to be habitable.
But what if instead of directly colonizing a planet, especially a place as hostile as Mars, we create a structure large enough to house tens of thousands of people somewhere in space?
A megastructure
As the astrophysicist Pekka Janhunen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki and leader of the work, suggests that Ceres would be an ideal place to place such a structure, which would turn it into a satellite: a mega-satellite. Such an orbit would be close enough to the dwarf planet that a 1,000-kilometer-long space elevator could transport material from the surface to the mega-satellite for construction and resupply.
Ceres has more than enough nitrogen, water and carbon dioxide to carry out such an ambitious project that it would be summarized in a mega-satellite of thousands of cylindrical spacecraft, linked together within a disk-shaped structure that would permanently orbit the dwarf planet Ceres. (the largest object in this asteroid belt).
“The main reason is that Ceres has nitrogen, which is necessary for the atmosphere of the settlement.” “We chose to orbit Ceres so that the settlement remains physically close to the source body,” says Janhunen.
According to his approach, each cylindrical ship that would be held in place by powerful magnets, could house more than 50,000 people, support an artificial atmosphere and generate a gravity similar to that of the Earth through the centrifugal force of its own rotation , he points out. the expert. This orbital settlement would also have a pair of mirrors on either side of the megastructure that would collect sunlight, which could be adjusted to collect as much sunlight as the dwarf planet moves around the Sun and whose natural light shines through. it would be used to nourish the vegetation on board, among other things.
” The habitats would be illuminated by natural sunlight. Sunlight is collected on the disk by two flat mirrors inclined at an angle of 45 degrees and concentrated at the desired intensity by parabolic mirrors”, comments the astrophysicist.
Mind you, to create Earth-like gravitational conditions, these spinning satellites would have to orbit Ceres in just 66 seconds. The megastructure would act like a space station rotating to generate enough centrifugal force to imagine a g, Earth’s gravity.
Problems
The biggest hurdle we can face, if we seriously consider this idea, is getting there. It is not exactly close: more than 500 million kilometers (a distance comparable to that of Mars). That it is the dwarf planet closest to Earth does not make it easier. But what does seem clear is that its low gravity, rotational speed and abundance of raw materials suggest that Ceres will become a very important turning point in our future expansion throughout the solar system and, according to Janhunen, it could support up to 10,000 times the current population of the Earth.
For now, let’s look hopefully at the coming moonbase.
Referencia: Pekka Janhunen. Terraforming the dwarf planet: Interconnected and growable Ceres megasatellite world, arXiv:2011.07487v3 [physics.pop-ph] arxiv.org/abs/2011.07487
