smbhax at 4:08AM, Feb. 15, 2013

I did use Ceres as sort of a model for the planetoid Selenis and the Major were just on, but they're low-grav experts. >_> And it tails off very quickly as you go smaller; for instance on Saturn's moon Mimas, 400 km across, you'd weigh just 0.006 of your Earth weight! So I'd weigh like a pound there. With something like the asteroid they're at now, which is a good deal under 1 km across even at its longest dimension, you effectively weigh nothing.

smbhax at 3:49AM, Feb. 15, 2013

...which would probably make walking really tricky!

smbhax at 3:49AM, Feb. 15, 2013

I pulled an abrupt location shift since the rather large, round planetoid on the previous page! That's a good question about gravity, and the answer is: quite big! Even that planetoid was technically a bit iffy. You can't get too much less massive than our (unusually large) Moon, I think, before something like walking would get pretty darn tricky. Hm well for instance the Moon is about 3500 km across, which sounds like a lot, but its mass is only 1.2% of Earth's, and your weight on the surface is about 1/6th of what it is on Earth (higher than you might think based on the mass, but that's because you're so much closer to the center of gravity). Meanwhile the dwarf planet Ceres, which is just under 1000 km across--still sounds pretty darn big, right?--is about as massive relative to the Moon as the Moon is relative to Earth (Ceres is 1.3% of the Moon's mass, and 0.015% of the Earth's mass), and THERE you weigh just 2.8% of what you weigh on Earth. So I would weigh like 5 pounds on Ceres

KimLuster at 5:06AM, Feb. 14, 2013

Is that what they're on? How big does an object have to be to have a functional gravity field for humans? Cool self-portrait - sorta brooding :)