Asteroids again!

[ffutures]

The final list of asteroids is the four classic ones - Ceres, Pallas, Vesta and Juno, a representative Trojan: 624 Hektor, Eros, and Icarus. Any others I should consider adding, e.g. anything spectacularly weird? Basically, I'll be giving basic astronomical data for each one - orbital period, distance from the sun, gravity, etc., something about minerals etc., and possibly some adventure seeds such as a "submarine into Ceres" thing.

I'm having a lot of trouble getting my head around the mass of asteroids - I don't think my brain can manage that many zeros. Has anyone done a table comparing them to e.g. Mount Everest, e.g. Ceres is 10,000,000 mount Everests, or whatever?

Before anyone asks, I really don't want to do a "deflect the asteroid from hitting an inhabited planet" adventure, that's been done to death, and it would be nice to give this sort of graphic indication of their mass to show why messing with their orbits really isn't practical when your drive can accelerate a few hundred tons at .01g at best.

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Well, Hektor is a good candidate for being spectacularly weird - the best evidence is that it's a pair of 200km asteroids touching one another and rotating around their common centre of mass.

(Hmm, that Wikipedia article links to one on 'Asteroids in Fiction', which notes that Hektor was the setting for Stephen Baxter's story 'The Fubar Suit' - and links to a copy of it. On my web site. Small internet, eh?)

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Wasn't Hektor accused of being the culprit responsible for the disintegration of the Offog in "Allamagoosa"?