Meteroids and solar sails - again

Hi,

This thread has been dead for a while, but another day I was thinking about
it again... In the last episode, Al Globus said that the rotation of
meteoroids present a serious drawback for the idea of bringing small rocks
to Earth Orbit by using solar sails. But then I thought: what about
transporting the meteoroids *without* stopping their spin?

That would require some means of dragging the meteoroids without touching
them. Well, I think that that mean exist: diamagnetic repulsion. Imagine a
magnetic trap composed of two big coils facing each other (perhaps with
three small coils circling the space between the two big ones, for avoiding
side movements), big enough to enclose a meteoroid inside the trap. It would
be similar to magnetic and electrostatic traps used to imprison atom clouds
and electrons, but this time used for enclosing a macroscopic chunk of
matter. Applying current to the coils, the resulting magnetic field would
keep a non-ferromagnetic object (like a carbonaceous condrite meteoroid)
stationed at the center of the trap, due to the diamagnetic repulsion.

I had not done the calculations, but it seems that the magnetic fields
required would have to be relatively feeble. They would have to provide
repulsion forces comparable to the pull of the solar sail attached to the
trap, and solar sails provide a remarkably low acceleration. On Earth,
diamagnetic repulsion can be used to counteract gravity and levitate frogs
and water (among other things), but at the expense of a very intense
magnetic field (something around 16T, with I remember correctly); for
meteoroid traps, however, perhaps a field a thousand times weaker would
suffice.

As for ferromagnetic meteoroids (iron-nickel ones, to be precise), the
approach would have to be not a magnetic trap, but a magnetic "tractor
beam"... The intensity of the magnetic field would have to be actively
controlled to maintain the meteoroid at a fixed distance from the coils.
I've
seen similar devices used to levitate iron balls, for example.

So, with those "touchless drag" devices, a solar sail could bring a
meteoroid to Earth Orbit without having to care about the meteoroid spin. Of
course the meteoroid rotation would still have to be stopped to be
processed, but I guess that that could be done more easily at a space
manufacturing/processing facility than by the solar sail robot itself.

As usual, the idea above sounds perfect for me now that I just wrote it, but
the authors of ideas seldom see their flaws at first. So, what do you think?
Am I missing something that would make this problematic or completely
impossible?

Thanks in advance,

Lucio Coelho