We will capture comets if we have to.

These conditions afford good "transparency," he explained: The atmosphere is more transparent --that is - less filled with clouds - and the camera can better capture stars, comets and nebulae outside our solar system.

Or they may be natural objects towed into place around the earth by rockets: captured asteroids or comets, perhaps.

Some small moons going around the planets are probably captured asteroids or comets; the moons of Mars and the outer satellites of Jupiter may be in this category.

An'na having told me of her ideas to rejuvenate the old Lorr starship that now or- bited the Earth and use it to capture comets which could be dropped on the polar ice caps to increase the amount of water in Mars' atmosphere!

Spinning wheels and cylinders are in even higher orbits, and beyond the moon, scattered through local space, are the Apollo asteroids and several thousand captured comets, all of them settled, all of them wet and warm and dressed up in their transparent coats so nothing boils or drifts away.

In June 2010 Harold F. Levison and others suggested on the basis of enhanced computer simulations that the Sun "captured comets from other stars while it was in its birth cluster".

It is much less likely to capture asteroids or wandering comets than are Jupiter or the Sun.

Such families are thought to arise from the planet capturing formerly long-period comets into shorter orbits.