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This topic is available for NewMars members who might wish to help to assemble links, images and text about the new observatory for an all sky survey.
The article at the link below reports on discovery of asteroids in the first seven days of operation.
https://www.livescience.com/space/astro … servations
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Post #3 by Calliban: report on Vera Rubin and discussion of asteroid rotation.
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 67#p237467
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This telescope started operation in 2025. It is expected to detect hundreds of thousands of new small bodies in the solar system.
One interesting recent discovery is a main belt asteroid some 710m in diameter, rotating once every 1.88 minutes. That is a surface velocity of 19.8m/s.
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news … -2025-mn45
It occurs to me that rapidly rotating bodies like this could provide free energy accelerating spacecraft onto different orbits. They are also potential weapons in a future solar system. Using this body in particular, a tether with a length of 101 asteroid radii (35.85km) would have a tip speed of 2km/s. Such a tether could hurl projectiles onto trajectories that would collide with planets and space colonies. This would be relatively cheap and technically easy to do.
Something like this was featured in the sci-fi series The Expanse. The Belters hurled space rocks and lumps of iron onto a collision course with Earth. They coated them with stealth tech composites to prevent them from being detected and taken out by nuclear tipped missiles and rail guns before impact. Using rapidly rotating asteroids as slings, this sort of thing could actually happen in the centuries ahead. In the nearer future, tapping asteroid rotation can be used to reduce the propulsive dV needed to bring ores mined on asteroids back to Earth orbit.
Edit SpaceNut: Copied your post before closing the other one.
Last edited by SpaceNut (2026-01-21 18:18:02)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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This post is about a research group that is looking forward to the Rubin Observatory results....
The article from which this was quoted is about a theory that dark matter and neutrinos may collide occasionally, and those collisions over a few million years may have contributed to the lumpy nature of the observed Universe.
"The final verdict will come from upcoming large sky surveys, such as those from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and more precise theoretical work," research team leader Sebastian Trojanowski, a theoretical physicist at the National Centre for Nuclear Research in Poland, explained in a separate statement. "These will allow us to determine whether we are witnessing a new discovery in the dark sector or whether our cosmological models require further adjustment. However, each of these scenarios brings us closer to solving the mystery of dark matter."
Article SourcesZu, L., Giarè, W., Zhang, C. et al. A solution to the S8 tension through neutrino–dark matter interactions. Nat Astron (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02733-1
https://www.livescience.com/physics-mat … n-interact
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