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Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?
> its orbit takes it from just beyond the orbit of Saturn (10.9 AU) all the way out to the Oort Cloud It looks like it currently orbits the sun.
It's also pretty small, about 1/20th the size of the moon. Huge for a comet, but smaller than Ceres.
Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?
But for interstellar objects, the answer is always "no". Unless it passes very close to some object that there's an orbital slingshot (or a collision, the odds of both are basically zero), interstellar objects always move away.
Apologies if this is an obvious question but I'm not familiar with astronomy. Will this dwarf planet just pass through our solar system or is there a chance it will start to orbit our sun?
Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.
Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
Although it does seem like interesting idea.
However, we have sent probes much further than this object (aka the voyager missions).
So it would mainly be useful for studying this object. So a telescope would be less than ideal since we could always in theory deploy a telescope much deeper into space if we wanted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
New Horizons took a nearly straight shot to Pluto (just stopping by Jupiter on the way for a gravity assist). That trip took 9 years to travel 40 AU (not at constant speed, of courses, since it's constantly being drawn toward the Sun). This dwarf planet makes its closest approach at 10 AU, so you could do a fly by in less than 3 years if you wanted to pay for it. However, the science return from a flyby would be limi…
Getting into orbit would be rather difficult, as the probe would have have to match the planets velocity at perihelion. My instinct says it’s probably just on the edge of doable (although I’m not sure on which side), but I haven’t crunched the numbers. It would almost certainly need to be launched on a Delta-IV or Falcon Heavy class vehicle. EDIT: s/perigee/perihelion. I could say periapse and be neutral, but perihel…
Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?
Soft-landing the telescope on an airless body would be harder (in delta-V terms) than just launching it into an equivalent solar orbit. And the body would block about half your view of the sky at any one time.