I mean if every variable aligns with any possible edge case that can bleed off velocity including three body interactions with the moon. Is there ever a situation where some substantial (car++) or enormous (skyscraper+++) size rock lands on the surface without explosive energy? Align stars, consult math mediums, play some ZZ Top, piss off Bary the narcissist, or conjure a primordial black hole, just land me a big rock in my yard Science Santa. I want an m-type for Maymass, but any type will do if you can land it.
KSP player here. So, you know, ignore me.
But let’s consider how you’d rendezvous two objects. You’d want your asteroid to have an orbit around the Sun that is very nearly the same orbit as Earth’s. A perigee that just kisses the Earth’s orbital ellipse and an apogee that’s slightly further from the sun. You’d want the asteroid to approach its perigee at the same time as Earth approaches that same point in space. Then they’d have very close to 0 relative velocity, with the asteroid moving slightly faster around the Sun than the Earth. So you just bleed off some of the asteroid’s velocity through whatever magical explanation you want… such that your asteroid has 0 relative velocity with Earth, giving it the exact same orbit as Earth. I.e. from Earth’s perspective it’s just floating there motionless in space.
Problem is that this only works for a rendezvous between two very light objects with very small gravitational effects between them. The Earth is massive enough that the effects from Earth’s gravitation would overtake the Sun’s as the asteroid approaches Earth. Then, yeah, the asteroid becomes a falling rock with a lot of energy so I don’t think any of this works.
This scenario but we add a third object that will pass inside the Earth’s orbit between the Earth and the small object and very fast to escape Earth’s gravity and move away, so to momentarily exert a large gravitational force and to locally cancel (and more) Earth’s gravitational pull to slow down the small object to about zero near ground level.
Tidal effects will be catastrophic so please don’t do this to your home planet unless you really, really want to.
Yeah, with a Lagrange keyhole orbit past the Moon (which is what OP is asking about, not just plain escape velocity), you could park an Asteroid Belt asteroid in an orbit around the Earth. But it will be a high orbit. Not sure how low you could get it, I’m hoping a circular geostationary orbit is possible? But more likely something in the 300,000km range.
Low orbit is out of the question. Maaaybe you could park the asteroid in a highly elliptical orbit where the perigee is inside the atmosphere. The drag will circularize it if the asteroid is small enough. But not so small or weak that it burns up or breaks up before that happens. And not so big that drag takes too long and the orbit wobble makes it hit the surface. In a low Earth orbit you now only have 8km/s delta-v to deal with.
But to get the asteroid to gently touch the surface the way OP describes it, like some sort of skyhook? Is impossible short of a planet X or a rogue black hole passing even closer to the Earth than the Moon at the right moment. And whatever remains afterwards would be hard to call a surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk