3 ms·
Out of ignorance, I was guessing it takes a lot less fuel to put a payload in the path of an incoming interstellar traveling rock and let that get "crashed into
by newsbinator 7y ago
Out of ignorance, I was guessing it takes a lot less fuel to put a payload in the path of an incoming interstellar traveling rock and let that get "crashed into" to embed on the surface.
Although that's still complicated space ballet.
- dmurray 7y agoWe don't really have any "scanning and transmitting" technologies that can survive crashing at, say, 1km/s. You need at least 50 km/s of delta-v to catch the likes of 'Oumuamua, so if you could get within 1 km/s of its orbit you might as well spend the tiny extra bit to land gracefully.
- perl4ever 7y agoMy impression is that a way to look at it is that at 50 km/s, everything is liquid, if not plasma.
- dmurray 7y agoThings zip around at 50 km/s all the time and stay solid, that's not a problem. We can even imagine technologies that survive a 50 km/s impact. Like self-replicating nanobots based on tardigrades, stashed in the interior of an asteroid - plenty of people already think life has been spread in asteroid-planet collisions. But we definitely don't have those now.