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Rochester scientists use physics and engineering principles to show how asteroids could be future viable space habitats.

Asteroids are rocky bodies orbiting the sun, leftover from the formation of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists estimate there are about 1,000 asteroids larger than one mile across traveling in our solar system. Besides their abundance in the solar system, asteroids offer many advantages for human habitation, including their rocky layers, which provide a natural shield against deadly cosmic radiation from the sun.

But asteroids have several major drawbacks, the researchers found: the rock that comprises asteroids is not strong enough to withstand the forces of even one-third of Earth’s gravity from spinning. Once an asteroid was set into rotation, it would merely fracture. Moreover, most asteroids are not even solid rock but “rubble piles”—clusters of loose boulders, stones, and sand held together by the weak mutual gravity of space. If the researchers wanted to make space habitats out of these asteroids, they’d have to figure out how to work with rubble piles. Read more here.