The Dig comes to my mind from 1995.
Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
41–50 of 118 posts
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would make sense to plan a probe mission where the probe would be put into storage to stand by for these kind of events. It would still be a challenge and might be impossible to find a launch window and reach the passing object in time, but it would be worth trying. Just imagine how tragic it would be, if an ancient artifact of an alien civilization drifts by earth and we don't manage to have at least a lo…
Yeah and then you'd need the delta-V to match the object's velocity as well, which would be solar escape velocity and then some. Although having probes scattered around the solar system that could be trained onto the object to get observations from multiple simultaneous angles would be neat. I hope one day we'll get a solar system wide observation network. Like the current arrays of radio dish observatories, but on a…
The delta-V would be a big problem. Though, if the probe is reansoably small and you would have reservation for a F9 Heavy flight, you could get some impressive delta-V. Detecting a candidate for such a mission early on would help a lot too.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
"And on far-off Earth, Dr. Carlisle Perera had as yet told no one how he had wakened from a restless sleep with the message from his subconscious still echoing in his brain: The Ramans do everything in threes."
Great series of books! Every time I see a thread about this big rock I think of Rama.
Beg to differ.
Great book.
Awful cheap hacks posing as sequels. I regret reading them - they've nearly ruined the original for me.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#44I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
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Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#45I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
The odds we expect depend on our detection ability. Maybe there are thousands of these objects but we saw this one only because it passed so close to Earth.
"Such an intrinsically faint body could be discovered only thanks to the close Earth flyby in October 2017, which created a tremendous opportunity for the first detailed characterization of a minor object of exosolar origin."
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would make sense to plan a probe mission where the probe would be put into storage to stand by for these kind of events. It would still be a challenge and might be impossible to find a launch window and reach the passing object in time, but it would be worth trying. Just imagine how tragic it would be, if an ancient artifact of an alien civilization drifts by earth and we don't manage to have at least a lo…
Wouldn’t such an object be emitting radio signals that earth could receive?
Not if it's something like another civilization's Tesla Roadster.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#47I am truly surprise that we don't get more interstellar visitors into our solar system. It kind shows how small our solar system is, or other way, how big the universe is.
We could have many more and not know. This one was seen because it came so close to the earth.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The odds we expect depend on our detection ability. Maybe there are thousands of these objects but we saw this one only because it passed so close to Earth.
There is fairly strong consensus in the astronomy community that possibly hundreds of Sednoid class objects exist, and those are in relatively normal orbits compared to things which are beyond solar escape velocity. But so far we've only found 3 or 4 Sednoids. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sednoid
Sednoids orbiting in the kuiper belt are totally different from extrasolar objects on hyperbolic trajectories. Oamuamua passed inside Mercury's orbit.
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just that it's unusually close.
As we are in paranoid mode (and it's fun to be, isn't it?): not only it's unusually close, but it seems that Earth is the planet it pass closer in all the Solar System. Maybe somebody should check if that "slightly acceleration" bring it closer or farther to Earth. Maybe we have been photographed. I hope it's not that somebody shoot us and failed.
Aliens got us just before GDPR, sneaky bastards!
Re: Interstellar Visitor Found to Be Unlike a Comet or an Asteroid
#50I'm still convinced this is an alien probe. I mean look at that trajectory. 0.163 AU from Earth - what are the odds? The spinning is irrelevant surely - I mean, it's all relative, so as far as ’Oumuamua is concerned, we're spinning. Maybe it was spinning that way to stay aligned with a distant companion for communication.
This has always fascinated me. We can actually build giant spaceships (space stations) inside asteroids and use them for interstellar travel. All the resources we need, including ice would be at our disposal. Like traveling with your own mini-planet. Dirk Schulze had taken that as a subject into his sci-fiction book - Alien Encounter.
From an energy perspective, it's likely better to build your own station (from an asteroid - or alternative, remove all the mass from the asteroid that you don't need) - that way, you're only accelerating exactly the mass that you need, not wasting any energy accelerating the rest of an asteroid.