Xueba's technology tree

Chapter 399 Capturing Asteroids

Zhou Yu agreed to the scientist's request, and he began to recall other scientists and engineers scattered on Ceres.

The Endeavor spacecraft begins preparations for its return journey.

The nuclear power reactor of the Endeavor spacecraft operates at high speed, providing huge power for the gravitational engine.

The gravity engine began to adjust its direction, analyzing the gravity and space conditions around the Endeavor spacecraft.

The gravitational engine quickly locked on to the most obvious sun's gravity, and the entire spaceship seemed to be pulled by the sun's gravity, and quickly moved closer to the earth's orbit.

The Endeavor spacecraft flexibly shuttles inside the asteroid belt, in order to make full use of the gravity of the sun and other planets to reduce the pressure on the miniature nuclear fusion reactor.

The trajectory of the Endeavor spacecraft presents a large arc, heading toward the Earth.

From the perspective of space, the trajectory of the Endeavor spacecraft is not the shortest trajectory, but it has detoured a long way.

With the trajectory of the Endeavor spacecraft combined with the gravitational map, it can be easily found that the Endeavor spacecraft has made full use of the surrounding gravitational force.

The Endeavor spacecraft achieves the best balance between saving energy and running time.

After several days of voyage, the Endeavor spacecraft has almost passed through the asteroid belt and entered the orbit of Mars.

It is also on this side close to Mars that most of the asteroids are composed of metallic asteroids.

Certain metallic asteroids are literally walking veins.

The spaceship comes here, and its resource detection radar is turned on to the maximum.

No one would say no to mining some resource-rich asteroids without delaying the formation of the spacecraft.

The resource detection radar on the Endeavor spacecraft is constantly collecting data on the asteroids they detect.

When the engineers saw the data fed back by the resource detection radar, they were not at all moved.

Most of the asteroids detected by resource detection radars are the most common asteroids.

Most of them are composed of metal, carbonaceous and silicate mixtures.

Even if there are metal veins and non-metal veins on these asteroids, it is necessary to detect the veins in advance and invest in cost mining.

For mining companies, the resources on these asteroids will definitely not let go of these resources.

The Endeavor spacecraft is passing through the asteroid belt, and these very troublesome asteroids will certainly not be mined.

The Endeavor spacecraft has drawn a trajectory in space, and it will detect thousands of asteroids every minute it travels.

They sailed for a long time without finding an asteroid worthy of capture by the Endeavor spacecraft.

Zhou Yuzheng felt that he was out of luck, and there were no resource-rich asteroids nearby.

He suddenly heard the engineer report in surprise: "An asteroid with a diameter of 25 kilometers has been discovered, and 92% of the elements on this asteroid are gold elements.

It is a veritable golden planet, worthy of our capture. "

Zhou Yu immediately issued an order: "Start capturing this golden asteroid immediately."

Zhou Yu was very excited. The gold asteroid with a diameter of 25 kilometers contains more gold reserves than the proven gold reserves on the earth.

Gold is a precious metal. Even if gold is mined from the moon and other places, its price has not dropped much.

The most critical thing is the space fluctuation detector, a high-end equipment of Xinghuo Technology, which has a very high demand for gold.

Whether the spatial fluctuation detector is applied in the macroscopic field or the microscopic field, it can play a very strong role.

The core component of the radar system of the Endeavor spacecraft is the space fluctuation detector.

That's why the Endeavor spacecraft's resource detection radar can find resources on asteroids.

The spatial fluctuation detector has many advantages, but its only disadvantage is that the manufacturing cost is too high.

Not to mention the ultra-high technology required to manufacture the space fluctuation detector, but the hundreds of tons of gold raw materials it needs, that is the quality of an astronomy class.

The most important thing is that the value of gold is extremely high, even if you have money, you can't buy much gold.

What's more, gold reserves are really scarce. Even if the gold on the earth is bought out, several space fluctuation detectors can be manufactured.

These equipment, which consume extremely high raw materials, can only be satisfied by developing space resources.

After hearing Zhou Yu's order, the engineers in charge of resource mining on the Endeavor spacecraft started to act immediately.

The radar system on the spacecraft began to analyze the situation of the golden asteroid, mainly analyzing the crust of the golden asteroid, including the density and hardness of the crustal material.

After the engineers analyzed the basic data of the golden asteroid, they began to calculate the data and prepare to complete the plan to capture the asteroid.

The launch port of the spacecraft opened, and 32 cylinders with a length of 18 meters and a diameter of 2 meters flew out quickly.

These cylinders quickly flew over the golden asteroid and arranged according to the directions calculated in advance.

The front end of the cylinder is composed of multiple drill bits, which are driven by the motor and immediately penetrate deep into the crust of the gold asteroid.

The drill bit tightly binds the cylinder to the asteroid through steel cables.

After the cylinder is firmly fixed on the asteroid, these devices will be taken over by the moon base to command their actions in a unified manner.

This cylinder is a tiny fusion thruster, which emits orange flames and pushes the golden asteroid to change its orbital direction.

The entire process of the Endeavor spacecraft capturing the golden asteroid took only 53 seconds including the data calculation time.

The Endeavor spacecraft started preparations tens of kilometers away from the golden asteroid, and when it came near the golden asteroid, it happened to release the nuclear fusion reactor propeller.

The Endeavor spacecraft galloped by, but the golden asteroid was slowly moving towards the earth under the power provided by the nuclear fusion thruster. Its destination was the metal smelter on the periphery of the moon.

Seeing that the Endeavor spacecraft successfully captured the asteroid, Zhou Yu smiled.

This is the asteroid capture plan he designed, and the first experiment was a great success.

Xinghuo scientists have proposed many asteroid capture schemes, but all of them are only suitable for use in specific environments due to obvious shortcomings.

For example, grabbing an asteroid into a spacecraft through a robotic arm.

This scheme must keep the spacecraft and the asteroid relatively stationary, and the asteroid to be captured must be very small.

Capturing the asteroid by dragging it with a rope net requires the speed of the spacecraft to be extremely low.

Otherwise, pulling the asteroid at high speed can easily cause traffic accidents and directly crash the spacecraft.

Through the radar system on the Endeavor spacecraft, Zhou Yu watched the moon base command the nuclear fusion thrusters, pushing the golden asteroids to move slowly in the universe.

He said jokingly: "Asteroid, asteroid. You're old enough to learn to go to the metal smelter yourself."

(End of this chapter)