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I find Oumuamua intriguing, it seems so different to all the other asteroids and I do really wonder if it is an alien object. I wish we found more about it whil

• Delk 4y ago
  > There were suggestions we could send a probe to catch it up, but I doubt we ever will. I'm not an expert, but that doesn't sound quite feasible to me. Not now that it's already far away, if it ever was. According to the post, 'Oumuamua is now beyond the Pluto orbit, about five years after its perihelion. New Horizons took nine years to reach Pluto, and it used a gravity assist from Jupiter. Using a gravity assist is of course done for probably every mission into the outer reaches of the Solar system, but you might have to wait for a suitable arrangement of planets if you wish to get into a particular direction, and by that time 'Oumuamua would be even further away. Its velocity relative to the Sun or us was something that'd have been hard to reach even when it was close by, relatively speaking. 'Oumuamua's trajectory is also highly inclined with respect to the orbits of the planets in the Solar system, and it's generally more expensive in terms of energy to get into a highly inclined trajectory. Happy to be shown wrong, but my hunch is all of that would be extremely hard to do. Astronomical distances and velocities and the energies required are huge.
  • tetris11 4y ago
    Do gravity assists ever really maximise their speed though? It was my impression that the slingshots occurred hundreds of kms above the planetary body, giving a moderate free speed boost at best. But if they were told to take a lower orbit, it'r be a drastic increase in speed