
Sending a Spacecraft to the Interstellar Asteroid - DanielleMolloy
https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03155
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garmaine
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.

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valuearb
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.

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remlov
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.

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batbomb
A space telescope isn’t fast enough. That’s why there is LSST.

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CydeWeys
We don't suspect that interstellar asteroids are particularly rare. The best
course of action would be to beef up the Earth-based telescope observation
network so that we can discover future ones further out. As a side effect we'd
get much better forewarning of potentially life-endangering near-Earth
adteorids as well.

Once you have better lead time on an asteroid, and catch it coming rather than
going, it's easier to intercept.

~~~
garmaine
What is interesting about this one is it’s shape, otherwise I don’t think
there’s be much interest in such a mission vs waiting for the next one (since
there could be as many as 3 a day if our models are correct).

What process other than aliens creates a kilometers long rotating cylinder? It
probably _IS_ a natural process, don’t get me wrong, but we haven’t a f$&@ing
clue what that might be which makes it really interesting to study.

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knome
Passing at great speed very close to a star? Outer shell or entire thing
becomes superheated and malleable. Extreme tidal forces as the object passes
the star and gets churned through the high gravity stretch it out. What if it
passed close to something super dense, like a black hole, allowing the
stresses of tidal force as it whipped around it to melt the rock on their own
leaving it to fly away, pulled long and cooling in the cold of dead space.

I don't know how likely such things are, but I don't imagine it takes
intelligence to make a long space rock.

~~~
garmaine
To make a long one without breaking it into multiple objects is very unlikely.
This thing isn't composed of silly putty -- rocks and metals tend to be
brittle and break rather than "stretch out".

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sitkack
Not if they are melted, or softened. It might have taken millions of close
orbits around a hot body for that shape to form.

~~~
sitkack
Which also might be why it was ejected and made it to our solar system. The
energy in its orbit might have been really high on a close approach to a star
and a slight deviation flung it out of that system.

A highly eccentric orbit would have a close approach around a star, and then
have it rapidly cool as it traveled away from the star. Repeat millions of
times. Would make for a nice orbital, thermal and materials science
simulation.

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Mizza
Now this is what I'm talking about! Really cool stuff!

I think this was kind of a wake up call that we don't have any kind of rapid-
response system ready and waiting to intercept interstellar objects. Even if
we don't get this one, we should damn sure be ready for the next one.

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JoeDaDude
I briefly worked with members of the planetary defense scientific community,
the folk thinking up ideas to defend the Earth from asteroids. This would be
great opportunity for them to demonstrate their technology, if they had ever
received any funding.

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joering2
I went thru all Reddit posts and major conclusion was that it cannot be a
spaceship - not because of its shape but rather because it was going much too
slow.

Someone calculated with its current speed it needs 50,000 years to get to
another star (thank you for correction). So no alien with technology to build
something like that would want to ride at a "bicycle" speed.

Unless of course they slowed down to take a turn (using Suns gravity pull),
just like riding 500HP car you slow down in the corners to leave them safely.

Edit: corrected, thank you friend.

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grondilu
Could be a derelict, though. Arguably, spaceship wrecks should be more
numerous than spaceships themselves. After all, assuming alien spaceships have
existed for a long time and have a relatively short operational time, they
exist for much longer as a wreckage and are as such much more likely to be
found in this form.

Just consider our own near-Earth space : there are many more space debris
there than there are operational satellites.

~~~
joering2
Few people argued back and forth that it could be a used alien rocket booster.

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umbrai_nation
Does it make any sense to place a series of landers in solar orbit, waiting
for short-lived opportunities like this? I don't think we'd save much on fuel
since the orbits wouldn't be optimized for the target. However, it would
require much less planning when opportunities arise, and wouldn't be as
reliant on the political winds of the day.

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mLuby
I'd guess not, as the various components that make up probes are constantly
improving. While it would be nice to have a 1990's era probe on hand to
investigate this asteroid, I bet we can learn a lot more from modern sensors,
and the electronics and comms will be more powerful and lighter.

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kchoudhu
Don't knock 90s technology: Hubble is still sending us gorgeous pictures of
the universe...

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mgdo
You can ask questions to the authors of this paper here:
[https://fermatslibrary.com/arxiv_comments?url=https%3A%2F%2F...](https://fermatslibrary.com/arxiv_comments?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F1711.03155.pdf)

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kirykl
We maybe can’t catch it or probe right now, but it wouldn’t be too hard to
target variety of EM transmissions at it

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shobith
That's pointless, EM is an outdated technology, nobody listens to it anymore.

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shobith
geez, it was a(n interstellar) joke guys! the aliens might be using neutrinos
or something!

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valuearb
"With the high approach speed a hyper-velocity impactor to produce a gas
'puff' to sample with a mass spectrometer could be the serious option to get
in-situ data."

This seems to assume it could never be an artificially made object.

~~~
mLuby
Plot for a new movie.

Live action "The Dig" anyone?

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teddyh
Fun fact: “The Dig” was originally planned to be a Spielberg movie, but the
cost of special effects made them change it into a Lucasarts Point-and-click
adventure game instead.

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zipwitch
Don't bother. It's just a decoy.

What we really need to do is start combing the databases for anomalous X-ray
flares so we can find any nearby Oasa emitters.

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z3t4
The problem is that unless you plan to crash into it you need to reach the
same speed. Or use a rail-gun to shoot an anchor.

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leot
Or cast a net.

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0xbear
That was underwhelming. I’d much rather see NASA’s or SpaceX’s or Roskosmos’s
take on this. AKA the entities that actually have the means to pull this off.

