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Sending a Spacecraft to the Interstellar Asteroid
- Mizza 9y agoNow this is what I'm talking about! Really cool stuff! I think this was kind of a wake up call that we don't have any kind of rapid-response system ready and waiting to intercept interstellar objects. Even if we don't get this one, we should damn sure be ready for the next one.
- JoeDaDude 9y agoI briefly worked with members of the planetary defense scientific community, the folk thinking up ideas to defend the Earth from asteroids. This would be great opportunity for them to demonstrate their technology, if they had ever received any funding.
- paulmd 9y agoI was thinking about this earlier - what could we have done better to intercept this one? Because that's the only way we'll catch the next one... Maybe wide-field Hubble-equivalents in the LaGrange points of the outer planets to help spot them on the way in? Ideally larger satellites with 25/50/100 years of cryogens available for long-duration missions? Although past a certain point your cryogen consumption would be constant - you're not getting heat from Sol, you're getting heat from your detectors/equipment... so a sunshield is useless.
- garmaine 9y agoIt’s okay, we can wait for the next one. They come in threes anyway. ;) Unfortunately the biggest hurdle to such a mission would be aligning political will and agency goals on a short time frame. NASA plans thingsnon 5 and 10 year horizons, so sending this mission means delaying something already in progress, which jeopardizes that project as everyone who was working on it goes off to do other things :( Can it be reached by a nearly empty payload on a Falcon Heavy or BFR certification flight? Getting a fully private mission might be the only option. Edit: just realized SpaceX might not be able to recover any stages from such a launch, so maybe not so enticing. With cross fueling they might get he first set of ejected stages though.
- valuearb 9y agoIt's a good reason to push for more space telescopes. I believe some day (probably after we start having regular interplanetary travel) we'll have robotic light recorders in space recording every bit of incoming extraterrestrial light, especially on the planetary plane. Then we'll be able to back up to view where objects like these entered the system, not just after they are detected. And perhaps just detect them when the are entering the system to give us as much lead time as possible.
- remlov 9y agoI am curious if anyone is actually thinking about this problem in terms of technology required that currently does or does not exist, particularity in tech needed to store such vasts amount of data, unimaginably high resolution sensors, etc. It sounds like a fun project to be part of really.
- greglindahl 9y ago"especially on the planetary plane" is a great algorithm for missing asteroids like this one.
- aruggirello 9y ago> especially on the planetary plane We do in fact already concentrate our efforts to look for objects near the ecliptic. It's the number one recommendation followed by amateur asteroid/comet discoverers. But actually, interstellar objects might be more uniformly distributed - even Oort cloud objects are supposedly non-aligned with the ecliptic. If anything, I'd expect interstellar objects to be slightly more likely to come from directions roughly along the galactic plane.
- umbrai_nation 9y agoDoes it make any sense to place a series of landers in solar orbit, waiting for short-lived opportunities like this? I don't think we'd save much on fuel since the orbits wouldn't be optimized for the target. However, it would require much less planning when opportunities arise, and wouldn't be as reliant on the political winds of the day.
- trafficlight 9y agoJust wait until there is a BFR supplied gas station in orbit for such an occasion.
- garmaine 9y agoAs a sibling points out it is a justification for developing in space refueling and orbital fuel depots. Then you could just launch something out of the Earth gravity well, fully refuel it, and then send it on such a trajectory.
- mLuby 9y agoI'd guess not, as the various components that make up probes are constantly improving. While it would be nice to have a 1990's era probe on hand to investigate this asteroid, I bet we can learn a lot more from modern sensors, and the electronics and comms will be more powerful and lighter.
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- CydeWeys 9y agoWe don't suspect that interstellar asteroids are particularly rare. The best course of action would be to beef up the Earth-based telescope observation network so that we can discover future ones further out. As a side effect we'd get much better forewarning of potentially life-endangering near-Earth adteorids as well. Once you have better lead time on an asteroid, and catch it coming rather than going, it's easier to intercept.
- garmaine 9y agoWhat is interesting about this one is it’s shape, otherwise I don’t think there’s be much interest in such a mission vs waiting for the next one (since there could be as many as 3 a day if our models are correct). What process other than aliens creates a kilometers long rotating cylinder? It probably IS a natural process, don’t get me wrong, but we haven’t a f$&@ing clue what that might be which makes it really interesting to study.
- tzs 9y agoCould it be a fragment from a collision of two larger rocky asteroids?
- fosk 9y agoIt could be but what collision would output a fragment of this size and shape? Maybe a supermassive one between two large planets
- mirimir 9y agoThere's also the fact that it seems to be doing a swing-by on the Sun. To pass fairly close to the Earth. But of course, that's why we detected it. Perhaps that are many that we don't detect. Maybe some very fast ones from Sagittarius A* ;)
- wallace_f 9y agoGiven 3-a-year assumption, I wonder what the probability is of one, by chance, getting a gravity boost like that to swing right by earth.
- valuearb 9y ago"With the high approach speed a hyper-velocity impactor to produce a gas 'puff' to sample with a mass spectrometer could be the serious option to get in-situ data." This seems to assume it could never be an artificially made object.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jgh 9y agowell the aliens can call our insurance agency if they don't like the dent we put in their ship.
- avian 9y agoAnything artificial that travelled interstellar distances must be robust enough to survive such impacts without damage.
- tzs 9y agoYes, but if it is artificial the owners might react differently to an intentional collision by another artificial craft than they would to a chance collision with a small asteroid even if no damage is done.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWe'll beam a "no trespassing" warning, first.
- mLuby 9y agoPlot for a new movie. Live action "The Dig" anyone?
- teddyh 9y agoFun fact: “The Dig” was originally planned to be a Spielberg movie, but the cost of special effects made them change it into a Lucasarts Point-and-click adventure game instead.
- kirykl 9y agoWe maybe can’t catch it or probe right now, but it wouldn’t be too hard to target variety of EM transmissions at it
- 0xbear 9y agoThat was underwhelming. I’d much rather see NASA’s or SpaceX’s or Roskosmos’s take on this. AKA the entities that actually have the means to pull this off.
- mgdo 9y agoYou can ask questions to the authors of this paper here: https://fermatslibrary.com/arxiv_comments?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1711.03155.pdf https://fermatslibrary.com/arxiv_comments?url=https%3A%2F%2F...
- joering2 9y agoI went thru all Reddit posts and major conclusion was that it cannot be a spaceship - not because of its shape but rather because it was going much too slow. Someone calculated with its current speed it needs 50,000 years to get to another star (thank you for correction). So no alien with technology to build something like that would want to ride at a "bicycle" speed. Unless of course they slowed down to take a turn (using Suns gravity pull), just like riding 500HP car you slow down in the corners to leave them safely. Edit: corrected, thank you friend.
- Santosh83 9y agoIt probably takes 50,000 years to get to another star. At a speed of ~80 km/s it would take millions of years to get to another galaxy, although I don't believe its current velocity is high enough to escape Milky Way.
- pdonis 9y agoThe escape velocity from the Milky Way at our position (about 30,000 light years from the center) is roughly 500 km/s, so yes, 80 km/s is well short of escape.
- grondilu 9y agoCould be a derelict, though. Arguably, spaceship wrecks should be more numerous than spaceships themselves. After all, assuming alien spaceships have existed for a long time and have a relatively short operational time, they exist for much longer as a wreckage and are as such much more likely to be found in this form. Just consider our own near-Earth space : there are many more space debris there than there are operational satellites.
- joering2 9y agoFew people argued back and forth that it could be a used alien rocket booster.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago>So no alien with technology to build something like that would want to ride at a "bicycle" speed. I agree with this conclusion and I think it is of natural origin but that conclusion does rest on several assumptions. 1. That its current speed is the speed it was traveling at in the interstellar medium. 2. That some technological civilization would be unwilling to wait 50,000 years. 3. That it is working as intended, it may have been designed to go faster but something went wrong. Perhaps it was never intended to cross interstellar distances at all.
- zipwitch 9y agoDon't bother. It's just a decoy. What we really need to do is start combing the databases for anomalous X-ray flares so we can find any nearby Oasa emitters.
- z3t4 9y agoThe problem is that unless you plan to crash into it you need to reach the same speed. Or use a rail-gun to shoot an anchor.
- leot 9y agoOr cast a net.