Mining the Oort
“By the time a comet had completed its long drop to the Sun, made its perihelion run, and been vectored to its final Mars approach, its course was set and its relative velocity down to a few kilometers per second. It was almost home . . . but that last step could be a killer.
That was where the stations in Mars orbit came in.
For the last few days of the comet's life they had it under their control. The control got easier as the comet caught up with the planet, because the distances diminished a...nd the response time became shorter and shorter; burn corrections were actuated almost as soon as commanded. But at the same time the fine-tuning became more urgent. The comet couldn't splash down just anywhere on Mars's old crust. It couldn't come within five hundred kilometers of a deme or an industrial outpost. It couldn't strike the Valles Marineris or Olympus Mons or any other of a hundred Martian surface features, because they were, it had been decreed, sites of significant value. In short, the comet had to land where it was meant to land, with a circular error probability of no more than two hundred kilometers—and that included 99 percent of its fragments.MoreLess
That was where the stations in Mars orbit came in.
For the last few days of the comet's life they had it under their control. The control got easier as the comet caught up with the planet, because the distances diminished a...nd the response time became shorter and shorter; burn corrections were actuated almost as soon as commanded. But at the same time the fine-tuning became more urgent. The comet couldn't splash down just anywhere on Mars's old crust. It couldn't come within five hundred kilometers of a deme or an industrial outpost. It couldn't strike the Valles Marineris or Olympus Mons or any other of a hundred Martian surface features, because they were, it had been decreed, sites of significant value. In short, the comet had to land where it was meant to land, with a circular error probability of no more than two hundred kilometers—and that included 99 percent of its fragments.MoreLess
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