OT: Ceres more interesting than previously thought

[dogscoff]

Quoth Cipher7071:
At 580 miles diameter, Ceres makes a mighty small planet, and size-wise it's more like many planetary moons. But I suppose, being that it's in orbit around the sun rather than one of the planets, it might qualify. The question then becomes: How big is big enough?

It's about big enough to be circular. It orbits the sun all by itself. Even has a thin atmosphere (probably). It's a planet, I tell you.

I wonder how much of an atmosphere it could hold if we were to introduce one. What if we were to spin it up to get Earth-like gravity? Would that help, or would we have to dome the entire planet to prevent the atmosphere from escaping? It being only a few hundred Ks across, could we put the entire world into a some kind of giant "buckybubble" instead? Engineering on larger scales- ie thousand-kilometre space elevators- are (apparently) feasible with fullerenes. Bubbling Ceres ought to be relatively easy.

wildcard06 intoned:
Let's not forget the most important reason - Slushie Mining Port.

youu'd have to genetically engineer ocean-dwelling bacteria or something that produced blue, rasberry flavour goop...

Mmm... genetically-engineered goop-flavoured blue space-slushie...