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It’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

It’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 ago
It'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 ago
  I 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.
  - batbomb 9y ago
    A space telescope isn’t fast enough. That’s why there is LSST.
  - mturmon 9y ago
    See: https://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu https://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu
- 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.
lxchase 9y ago
Hah I was going to see if anyone immediately thought of the reference of which you referred to.
- dmead 9y ago
  it's rama everybody.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
saulrh 9y ago
TBF, if it did work, I could almost see Elon going "fuck it" and bumping the next SpaceX launch in favor of boosting a cubesat out there.
- simonh 9y ago
  First we’d need to have a deep space planetary observation probe with a high dV propulsion system, an RTG and TWTA backed high gain antenna. Chucking a standard cubesat at it would be no more use than launching a washing machine. At this point the probe wouldn’t catch up with it until it’s at least as far away as Voyager is now.
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> Can it be reached by a nearly empty payload on a Falcon Heavy or BFR certification flight? Not even close. I don't think it's sunk into most hobbyists just how ridiculously fast ʻOumuamua is going. The fact that it came in at such a deep hyperbolic trajectory means that it's substantially faster relative to us than literally anything we have ever seen in the solar system before. Catching up to it in a human lifetime is a more demanding mission than anything we have ever done before, by a factor of at least two. It's honestly outside what traditional rocketry can do, to put a probe on it we would likely have to try something exotic like sun-diving solar sails, laser sail propulsion or at least nuclear electric propulsion.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Are you sure? I believe this is travelling at 26 km/s heliocentric dv while the sunscraper comet was blazing at 600 km/s. So it's not the fastest thing observed in the solar system, by a long shot. Voyaver 1 is going 17 km/s so it's not like it's ridiculously out of reach... And we launched that one a while ago. And remember, when people who say things like "NASA needs decades to plan these things," Korolev got out of the gulag in 1945, fresh and ready to work with almost all of his teeth missing and a jaw broken so badly he could not turn his head, it took him 15 years to: develop the first ICBM, first satellite in orbit, and the first sattelite around the moon, as well as the first object to impact the moon. Without his engineering expertise he would have rotted to death (based on false accusations) in the gulag. Voyager 1 was launched a long time ago and has roughly 75% the dv that Oumaumua has. It is very doable. We just need to demand it.
  - paulmd 9y ago
    The caveat to Voyager 1 is that it was launched during an ideal window and performed a pair of gravity-assist slingshot maneuvers, and took 30 years to do it. That is right out of the question as far as this intercept is concerned. It's direct-ascent or bust. There is no chance of accelerating anything with any substantial mass to that velocity. Hence me plugging starshot - the only chance of us catching up to it with anything at this point is for it to be fairyweight or atomically powered. The object has already slingshotted, we're mostly boned at this point. Unless we act now, with a cunning plan, we will never learn anything about this object in particular. Even still, we really can't put much onto any hypothetical probe.

valuearb 9y ago

It'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 ago
I 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.
- batbomb 9y ago
  A space telescope isn’t fast enough. That’s why there is LSST.
- mturmon 9y ago
  See: https://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu https://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu
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.

lxchase 9y ago

Hah I was going to see if anyone immediately thought of the reference of which you referred to.

dmead 9y ago
it's rama everybody.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

saulrh 9y ago

TBF, if it did work, I could almost see Elon going "fuck it" and bumping the next SpaceX launch in favor of boosting a cubesat out there.

simonh 9y ago
First we’d need to have a deep space planetary observation probe with a high dV propulsion system, an RTG and TWTA backed high gain antenna. Chucking a standard cubesat at it would be no more use than launching a washing machine. At this point the probe wouldn’t catch up with it until it’s at least as far away as Voyager is now.

Tuna-Fish 9y ago

> Can it be reached by a nearly empty payload on a Falcon Heavy or BFR certification flight? Not even close. I don't think it's sunk into most hobbyists just how ridiculously fast ʻOumuamua is going. The fact that it came in at such a deep hyperbolic trajectory means that it's substantially faster relative to us than literally anything we have ever seen in the solar system before. Catching up to it in a human lifetime is a more demanding mission than anything we have ever done before, by a factor of at least two. It's honestly outside what traditional rocketry can do, to put a probe on it we would likely have to try something exotic like sun-diving solar sails, laser sail propulsion or at least nuclear electric propulsion.

wallace_f 9y ago
Are you sure? I believe this is travelling at 26 km/s heliocentric dv while the sunscraper comet was blazing at 600 km/s. So it's not the fastest thing observed in the solar system, by a long shot. Voyaver 1 is going 17 km/s so it's not like it's ridiculously out of reach... And we launched that one a while ago. And remember, when people who say things like "NASA needs decades to plan these things," Korolev got out of the gulag in 1945, fresh and ready to work with almost all of his teeth missing and a jaw broken so badly he could not turn his head, it took him 15 years to: develop the first ICBM, first satellite in orbit, and the first sattelite around the moon, as well as the first object to impact the moon. Without his engineering expertise he would have rotted to death (based on false accusations) in the gulag. Voyager 1 was launched a long time ago and has roughly 75% the dv that Oumaumua has. It is very doable. We just need to demand it.
- paulmd 9y ago
  The caveat to Voyager 1 is that it was launched during an ideal window and performed a pair of gravity-assist slingshot maneuvers, and took 30 years to do it. That is right out of the question as far as this intercept is concerned. It's direct-ascent or bust. There is no chance of accelerating anything with any substantial mass to that velocity. Hence me plugging starshot - the only chance of us catching up to it with anything at this point is for it to be fairyweight or atomically powered. The object has already slingshotted, we're mostly boned at this point. Unless we act now, with a cunning plan, we will never learn anything about this object in particular. Even still, we really can't put much onto any hypothetical probe.