Joined: Feb. 2008
|Quote (Nerull @ July 10 2008,19:57)|
|Creationist Walt Brown claims that the asteroid belt was created by rocks blasted off of earth when the "Fountains of the Deep" erupted during the biblical flood.|
Wow. Now that's loonie.
|The idea is you try to get an asteroid into an orbit fully within the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Walt Brown claims this happened. Orbital mechanics says it can't. Now you can try it.|
Actually, with enough encounters and second order effects, I bet you can make it happen eventually. You'll start in an elliptical earth crossing orbit (obviously, since your single major impulse starts from earth), but enough interactions with Earth, Mars and Jupiter should be able to get you into a main belt orbit. For bonus point's, you can take advantage of light pressure and the Yarkovsky effect
Actually finding such a trajectory will be a royal pain, but I don't see offhand that it would be impossible.
You sure as heck aren't going to populate the whole belt that way (and anyway, we KNOW the isotope ratios don't support that). Of course, we do know that large amounts of the earth did get blasted into space... by other stuff running into us. Some of them probably escaped.
I tried to run your sim, but got an application configuration incorrect error, which AFAIK usually related to msvcrt versions.
In the meantime, maybe FTK can tell us what ID predicts about flounders ?