A reason to go to Mars

Lucio de Souza/Joe Strout: Thanks for your comments/responses!

Joe: Guess I overstated my opposition to a Moon Colony first.
Ireally believe colony construction will spring up on our
moon, Mars's surface & moons &all kinds of asteroids once
someone "breaks the ice" & starts to build first one.

Lucio: Thanks for link, guess I got mislead or misread that
first link I ref'd. Also found another NASAsite that lists
1011 PHA's (NEA's that come within ~4.65 million miles of
earth's orbit).It let's you bring up data on each at:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/ Of first 35 I've checked only
10 went to > 2 AU's from sun. However another 13 seem to
go outside Mars's orbit. I still cannot see how a vehicle could
go to an asteroid that goes further from sun than Mars with
less delta v than a vehicle needs to go to Mars (not incl'g a
soft landing on Mars's surface).
By "go to" I mean to bring vehicle to samespeed & direction
as NEA (not whiz past it or crash into it).
I still favor that Deimos moon of Mars for first colony. I tend
to liken your substitution of a NEA to advising Jamestown
& Plymouth Rock colonists to substitute some island down
near Azores instead of going all the way across Atlantic.
Think of all that risk & investment they could have saved!
Sorry for sarcasm, are you still owner of this group?

Hallelujah Praise Spacesettlers !!! Ed S.

--- On Mon, 12/22/08, Lucio de Souza Coelho wrote:

From: Lucio de Souza Coelho
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] Re: : A reason to go to Mars
To: spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com
Date: Monday, December 22, 2008, 4:05 AM

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Schonert Edward
(...)
> http://clowder. net/hop/railroad /railroad. html
> Looks to me like least elliptical NEA orbits still go from ~1AU to >2AU
> from sun. To reach this orbit would require a far > delta v than reaching
> Mars's orbit, right?
(...)

Wrong. There are thousands of NEOs with a wide distribution of orbits,
and the delta-v for reaching some of them is less than the values for
reaching the Moon or Mars. And even not considering those most
favorable cases, there are entire clusters of NEOs with orbits around
1AU (see http://neo.jpl. nasa.gov/ neo/groups. html), so your picture of
all NEOs having highly elliptical orbits going beyond 2AU does not
correspond to reality.