Buckling an Asteroid Belt

MIT researchers, looking ahead, have proposed a solution to a problem that does not yet exist.

Walking on an asteroid may not sound like a big deal for a space explorer, but a one kilometer asteroid, for example, would have very little surface gravity. "Landing" on such a worldlet may well consist of an astronaut simply leaving the airlock of his or her ship and using a maneuvering unit attached to the spacesuit to reach the asteroid. Once there, an overly energetic step could launch the explorer back into space. To avoid that, MIT engineers want to secure a belt around the asteroid and have explorers attach themselves to the belt to stay on the suface. Simply drilling pitons into the rock to hold astronauts on the surface may not work, they say, because some small asteroids seem to be aggregations of rocks loosely held together by gravitational attraction. Drilling into rock by an astronaut in free space, unattached to anything, would also be tricky.

Such an approach would seem to be practical only for small bodies visited by small crews, but of course, that's all it needs to address. Larger bodies, like Ceres or Vesta, have stronger surface gravity.