Difference between revisions of "Gravity well"

Latest revision as of 04:02, 21 January 2009

A gravity well is a distortion in space-time caused by a massive body such as a planet. The term is a reference to the 3-dimensional analogy of this phenomenon: an extrusion of an otherwise 2-dimensional sheet. An actual gravity well involves higher-dimensional bending.

It is also used to describe the large escape velocity, or Delta v needed to "climb out" of the gravitational influence, of a massive body like a planet or a sun. Certain groups claim that planets aren’t the ideal place for a space faring civilization because they would have to expend a huge amount of energy to leave the gravity well.

However, most members of New Mars do not share this opinion because planets and moons provide an abundance of resources in a localized region, give plenty of room for people to expand and make certain industrial processes easier like mining and construction.

As romantic as floating though space may sound, the techniques required to build the structures without the support of any planet or moon colonies are considerable. Additional although there are tremendous resources in asteroids those resources are spread across great distances and to be able to harvest the need resources quickly will require advances in propulsion and the mining operations will probably be a bigger endeavour than one O'Neal colony could support.