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"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Impactor Determines Composition | ||
| The use of an impactor to smash into a small celestial body; watching the impact can determine the composition of the small body. |
Explorers from a Martian colony encounter what appears to be a small asteroid. How can you tell what it is made of without actually landing and taking samples?
| "There it is. Can you get a spectro?"
"No heat." Wendis shook his head. "I'll have to warm it up with a tracer." Fire streaked in a thin line from the muzzle of a cannon-like tube mounted beneath the viewing instruments and a tiny, rocket-powered projectile, drove towards the mysterious bulk. It hit, exploding into a cloud of incandescent vapour, and Wendis stared thoughtfully at the brilliant lines on the spectroscope screen. "... the spectro shows traces of iron, some copper, a little tungsten and a lot of beryllium. Looks unnatural somehow, too much like an alloy." |
| Technovelgy from The Mechanical Monarch,
by E.C. Tubb. Published by Ace Books in 1958 Additional resources -
|
As it turns out, it's not an asteroid at all.
The recent Deep Impact program, in which a comet's composition is investigated with the aid of an 850 pound impactor, now seems like a modern incarnation of an old idea.
Compare to the Spectro-Flash Analysis from Salvage in Space (1933) by Jack Williamson, the sounding projectile from Mad Robot (1936) by Raymond Z. Gallun and iron fingers from The Death's Head Meteor (1930) by Neil R. Jones.
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Tech news articles related to The Mechanical Monarch
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- Japan Uses Explosives On Asteroid
| Tumblin' Tumbleweed Rovers To Eplore Mars |
| Tentacled Robot Captures Space Debris |
| Reflect Orbital Sunlight On Demand |
| Elon Musk Wants Data Centers In Space |
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'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
