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Comment by willismichael | Hacker News Reader

My first reaction to this conversation was to imagine some kind of vacuum hose attachment. My second thought was "oh yeah... that won't work at all" :)

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I had the same reaction - actually, I was thinking in some sort of spatial hoover - but I am still trying to work out in my mind if it would work. Can you explain how you came to the conclusion it wouldn't?

There's no air.

Exactly, I almost facepalmed when I realized the absurdity of a vacuum hose... although I do wonder if something along the lines of a CO2 compression canister would work to blow away dust. I'm assuming that it would be prohibitively expensive to have to constantly ship compressed gas to the mining site though.

That's why you'd just ship an asteroid that's already made of gas and liquid, and mine that for your gas.

"Evaporate some more nitrogen off that asteroid, Joe, we need to blow this dust away."

And to be specific, vaccums work by creating a low pressure locality inside of a gas. Same principle behind a backwards fan. Push the gas one way, you create a small low pressure point that other gas then fills. In a vaccume-cleaner the region of gas that can rush in to fill the low pressure point is at the end of a nozzle.

Really, you're not vacuuming up objects, they're just along for the ride in their immediate atmosphere.

(...And in space, you have no atmosphere to manipulate.)

It would have no way to generate suction. However, if you moved the space hover INTO the dust, you could have a mechanical trap inside.

EDIT: Looks like I was a bit late, I wrote this comment ~hour ago but didn't post it till now. :P

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