Tuesday, September 26, 2023

6 Hebe

I've done Ceres (lots of Ceres), Vesta, Pallas, Juno... I'll skip #5 and head over to #6, a stony one like Juno and maybe what became Dimorph.

Be careful doing a search for "Hebe", by the way. Apparently it's code for something disgusting. Like "Ganymede" honestly; except that "Ganymede" is much more famous, so search-engines aren't as nasty for that. Um. That moon of Zeus in Alien Legacy? Maybe?

Hebe is 3810 kg/m3 so rock-dense and also irregular. It spins 30% of an Earth day, so, 7.2 hours. Fairly fast but not Bennu-fast. I expect it is, indeed, mostly solid rock.

There's been talk that we Earthers own meteorites from Hebe like we got 'em from Vesta. These are the H-chondrites, and circumstantial evidence is strong for that general hypothesis. Problem: there's a H-chondrite asteroid family as well, and these do NOT come from Hebe. Hebe doesn't have the mass for them all. So perhaps there existed, once, a proto-Hebe; which has since shattered more completely than Vesta has shattered, leaving Hebe as the largest shard.

K Blutstein is one who uses H meteorites as a Hebe proxy. He calculates much useful metal on Hebe (pdf) despite that Hebe is S not M. Hebe has the advantage over Psyche that Hebe is, I think, closer.

Still: getting to Hebe would be a problem. Hebe orbits outside Mars and is eccentric, so sometimes far outside Mars. Inclination is high as well at 14.736°. And I don't know how any colonists are going to dig in there and spin it.

Even if Hebe herself be not worth the visit; other S-types are closer to us, and might be more easily settled and processed.

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