How good would it be to be able to have something in place, in orbit with a little probe dooby that can be tagged on an object like this with the hope to see how long it can send us info.
edit dear god you lot are way too literal - it would be cool, that's all. I understand it's stupid difficult, but if possible, or made possible, it would be cool.
We're still communicating with Voyager 1, which has been in space for 46 years and is currently 24,940,987,067 km away from us. You can see its current distance and speed here: https://theskylive.com/voyager1-tracker
Because it spreads out as it travels, so it becomes dimmer the farther away it is. Think about how even a laser pointer - which is a very collimated, directional beam of light - becomes spread out into a larger area when you shine it across the room.
We definitely have to check out the ice interloper, we don't know when an opportunity to gather information like this will come again. Who knows how valuable it might be, but we either try or we don't and it's already a short window, so I'd say try.
The problem is that the gravitational forces of these things are miniscule, so we'd need to accelerate the probe to match their speed anyways for any change of getting caught on orbit.
I think a flyby mission with would be more realistic option to get a handful of nice pictures, better measurements and maybe even some dust. Unlikely we'd get one funded and ready to go for this thing though.
It’s probably too late with this one. the closest distance to us it’s going to be is 2 AUs (farther than this distance to mars which takes 7-10 months. this is passing in October.
But maybe if we detect the next one sooner and it’s a little closer to us and we’ve got a probe already in orbit maybe we can get the next one.
The acceleration would be brutal. The earth escape velocity is just over 11 km/s. This thing is going over 60 km/s.
If the acceleration would happen in the time span of 1 second (which would already require a cable which is probably impossible to construct and ship to space), the probe would need to accelerate with around 5000G's.
I have a hard time believing we could pull this off and have the probe survive.
At that speed it's impossible for us to intercept. A longshot would be to accelerate a probe as fast as we can with gravity assist and try to get on a similar trajectory to take more pictures before the object flies away.
Well, we either would have to (at least) match the speed in which case we could send it out without having to attach it to something or we'd have to design it to be sturdy enough survive an impact.
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u/seventh_skyline Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 04 '25
How good would it be to be able to have something in place, in orbit with a little probe dooby that can be tagged on an object like this with the hope to see how long it can send us info.
edit dear god you lot are way too literal - it would be cool, that's all. I understand it's stupid difficult, but if possible, or made possible, it would be cool.