Mr. Bass's Planetoid

 Mr. Bass's Planetoid is a 1958 children's science fiction novel by Canadian author Eleanor Cameron. The novel followed The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet (1954) and Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet (1956).

  I loved these books as a child. The notion that 2 boys could build a spaceship out of tin cans and travel to outer space was very appealing!
 The Illustrations are by Louis Darling.

Prewytt Brumblydge, inventor of the Brumblitron, must be found in order to disable the device before it destroys the Earth. This is a job for Mr. Bass, but he has disappeared... so the boys pore over his notebook for clues and go spacefaring to find Brumblydge. This time, instead of journeying to Basidium, they fly to an airless rock named Lepton that orbits 1,000 miles above the Earth's surface.

This novel also introduced the fictional metal Brumblium, a greenish metal, that shows as infragreen on a spectroscope, and is twice the density of uranium.