3 ms·

launch where exactly?

• 1970-01-01 3y ago
  That's the key, you absolutely need to design a probe where gravity is the guidance system. My take is a primary probe containing hundreds of hyper reflective microprobes, which scatter for billions of miles into space. After a few decades, the primary probe locates where the majority of mircoprobes went, and now you steer the primary probe into Planet 9's gravity well.
  • smitty1110 3y ago
    I think you're underestimating the area you need to search. See the wiki page[1]. There's so much space to look near, you need a much better guess before you can send any probes. A 9k year orbit, that starts at 340 AU, and has a lot of uncertainty in all the parameters, just leaves too much volume to check naively. And that doesn't even get into the fact that there's not enough light out there to feasibly find probes from their reflections. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
  • lamontcg 3y ago
    Uhhhh, we've got all those "microprobes" which are all of the known objects in the Solar System. A couple of them are a bit macro though (Jupiter in particular).
  • blindriver 3y ago
    It would fly directly into the Sun