Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Ceres, once considered an asteroid but now classified as a dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter, can host a significant ocean of liquid water beneath the surface. Scientists believe this would be a useful stopover from exploring the rest of the solar system.
Scientists propose a permanent human habitat orbiting Ceres
It’s like something straight out of “The Expanse”.
VICTOR TANGERMANN
7 JANUARY 2021
A group of Finnish researchers suggest a permanent human habitat in the orbit of Ceres, a massive asteroid and dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
According to the team, this “mega-satellite settlement” could be built by collecting materials from Ceres itself.
If this sounds familiar to fans of the popular science fiction book and TV series “The Expanse”, it’s because Ceres Station plays a central role in this fictional universe as one of the first human colonies outside the human world. However, in the series, the space rock itself was filmed to create a crewed habitat with artificial gravity on its surface.
In an article uploaded to the arXiv prewrite repository this week, the team argues that Ceres would be a prime property because it contains nitrogen, which could allow an Earth-like atmosphere to be created.
In fact, they argue that the environment might even be “better than the earth” as there are no adverse weather or natural disasters and there is plenty of habitat to grow in.
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Read more: https://futurism.com/permanent-human-habitat-orbiting-ceres
You can find the study here.
The biggest problem I see with Ceres being the first permanent home outside of the world is that there is no three day mission. The overwhelming benefit of having a moon base is that if you need to start an emergency mission to help the colony troubleshoot a critical problem, you can get to the moon relatively quickly.
Once we have experience with a lunar base, we can get rid of the training wheels and try to achieve something a little more ambitious.
Still, I understand why scientists are so enthusiastic about Ceres. The low gravity, the high rate of rotation and the abundance of useful and not always available raw materials suggest that Ceres will play a very important role in our future expansion throughout the solar system.
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