NASA Wants to Give Our Moon a Moon

[Cyberman]

Trying to think out of the box, which I'm now starting to wish I'd never climbed into, I can see how it might be used as an experiment into the logistics of asteroid mining or something. Or there could be an angle regarding developing the mission protocols for shepherding 'doomsday' asteroids into less apocalyptic orbits. Then again, maybe someone wants to do it just to show that they can.

[Darth]

All my intensive work on the stellar gravity simulator says that this is a bad idea.

[Cyberman]

The asteroid would have to be unfeasibly massive for its gravity to have any detectable effect on the Earth, or indeed the Moon. We are 'grazed' by asteroids known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs) on a relatively regular basis, but unless you keep up with astronomical bulletins, or happen to pay attention to the night sky, you'd never know.

[Rayaan]

Maybe NASA is just mulling over the idea of capturing and placing an asteroid in lunar orbit, but I'm betting that they won't actually do it.

This is useless.

[popeyespappy]

I don’t think the proposal is to place the asteroid in orbit around the moon. The plan is to either place it in the same orbit as the moon where it would become another satellite of Earth, or place it in a Lagrangian L2 orbit in which case it would remain a satellite of Sol.

Somebody asked why. The answer is we want to study asteroids. There has been talk of a manned mission to an asteroid. It would be a lot cheaper to bring the target of such a mission closer to Earth before sending people to check it out than it would be to send people all the way to the asteroid.

Will it happen? When pigs fly. Which considering the rate we are learning about genetics might not be all that far off...