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Would be very challenging to get there in time. 11AU is outside Saturn's orbit. With the high inclination of the orbit (95 degrees) it's coming in on a more-o
by Polizeiposaune 2y ago
Would be very challenging to get there in time.
11AU is outside Saturn's orbit. With the high inclination of the orbit (95 degrees) it's coming in on a more-or-less polar orbit of the sun. You might need a Jupiter flyby along the lines of what Ulysses did to fling it out of the ecliptic plane, but Jupiter might not be in the right place in its orbit to make that work..
And you'd need a very light spacecraft (not much mass budget for instruments) launched very fast, and it's far enough away from the sun that you'd want RTG power rather than solar panels.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoI'm far enough away from the sun that I want an RTG rather than solar.
- TheSpiceIsLife 2y agoEight days later… 13kW solar system installed today. Finacial incentives eh
- Archelaos 2y ago> With the high inclination of the orbit (95 degrees) ... How can such a high inclination be explained?
- Polizeiposaune 2y agoThe observed distribution of inclinations of long-period comets are why it's called the Oort cloud and not the Oort belt.. Short period comets are relatively close to the ecliptic, while very-long-period comets have evenly distributed inclinations suggesting that the objects in the Oort are more or less spherically distributed. Discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud#Development_of_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud#Development_of_theo...
- JoeDaDude 2y agoI can't make a fair comparison between the object in TFA and Oumuamua, the presumed interstellar object that passed through our Solar System not long ago. For the latter, a "Project Lyra" study [1] posits a combination of Earth and Jupiter gravitational assists to catchup with Oumuamua. Could a similar approach work for this comet? [1]. https://i4is.org/project-lyra-a-solar-oberth-at-10-solar-radii/#gsc.tab=0 https://i4is.org/project-lyra-a-solar-oberth-at-10-solar-rad...
- vivzkestrel 2y agowhat would it take to build and accelerate an object to 295000 kms/s? Like seriously, would it take nuclear propulsion or is it antimatter engine or solar sail?
- lsllc 2y agoThe speed of light is 299792.458km/s so according to a quick Google search it takes 4.28x10^17J to accelerate 1kg to 0.98c.
- fecal_henge 2y agoThats nearly an entire camenbert.
- vivzkestrel 2y agook so obviously we cannot slingshot someone with that speed or even use chemical rockets to reach those levels. So are there newer propulsion systems being worked upon?
- lsllc 2y agoIon thrusters [0], solar sails [1], nuclear pulse propulsion [2] are all things that have real research being done on them. There's more esoteric stuff (theoretical) such as the Alcubierre Drive [3] (Warp drive!) that's more of the realm of sci-fi. If you can maintain a constant 1g of acceleration, you'd get to ~0.99c in approximately 1 year -- but you need to carry/provide the energy to fuel whatever propulsion system you're using and the amount of fuel needed to maintain that 1g of acceleration increases as you get closer to c. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_thruster [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_sail [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pulse_propulsion [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive