Starship Asterisk*

Garthok Gnarfle wrote:
Maybe instead of a vessel as in Rama it's a shard of diamond thrown off by a birthing star as in Odyssey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Crystals#/media/File:Cristales_cueva_de_Naica.JPG wrote:

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<<Cave of the Crystals or Giant Crystal Cave (Spanish: Cueva de los Cristales) is a cave connected to the Naica Mine at a depth of 300 metres, in Naica, Chihuahua, Mexico. The main chamber contains giant selenite crystals (gypsum, CaSO₄·2 H₂O), some of the largest natural crystals ever found. The cave's largest crystal found to date is 12 m in length, 4 m in diameter and 55 tons in weight. The cave is extremely hot, with air temperatures reaching up to 58 °C with 90 to 99 percent humidity. The cave is relatively unexplored due to these factors. Without proper protection, people can only endure approximately ten minutes of exposure at a time.

The caves are accessible today because the mining company's pumping operations keep them clear of water. If the pumping were stopped, the caves would again be submerged in water. The crystals deteriorate in air, so the Naica Project is attempting to visually document the crystals before they deteriorate further. When mineral exploitation is ended in the area it is likely the pumps will be shut off and the cavern's water level allowed to rise again.>>

neufer wrote: The rock interior could act as a safe time capsule for frozen Earth species specimens and various artifacts.

The rock should be covered with optical & radar corner reflectors so that it can be tracked from Earth for a long time as well as making it easily locatable for aliens.

FOARP wrote:

InfinitiesLoop wrote:
Someone mentioned it in this thread already, but I think it deserves discussion -- what is the feasibility of a mission to outfit a visitor like this with sensors? Why build a probe when nature has provided one? We'd have to match its speed to be able to land on it, perhaps at that point you don't even need to land on it anymore. So I suppose the trick would be in getting something onto it without having to match its speed, like a snare or something. The more I think about it the more untenable it sounds, but there's gotta be something to it. Plenty of comets and asteroids with predictable orbits to practice on.

The problem here is: what exact problem are you solving by placing sensors on this rock (other than examining the rock itself, which is definitely worth doing)? To put anything on 'Oumuamua you need to match its velocity, so you're not solving a velocity problem. Getting anything there requires a space-craft capable of holding all the instrumentation so there's no structural issue you're solving. I suppose the rock could act as a dust-shield (so long as it's not tumbling too much) but that's about it. On the down-side it's not going anywhere we want to go (other than "To infinity! And beyond!") and so any instrumentation placed there will likely see a whole load of nothing outside of the rock itself that it wouldn't have seen otherwise going at the speed it would be going at.

InfinitiesLoop wrote:Someone mentioned it in this thread already, but I think it deserves discussion -- what is the feasibility of a mission to outfit a visitor like this with sensors? Why build a probe when nature has provided one?

We'd have to match its speed to be able to land on it, perhaps at that point you don't even need to land on it anymore. So I suppose the trick would be in getting something onto it without having to match its speed, like a snare or something. The more I think about it the more untenable it sounds, but there's gotta be something to it. Plenty of comets and asteroids with predictable orbits to practice on.

Chris Peterson wrote:

rstevenson wrote:

Zoomer wrote:
" ...because it is the first asteroid ever detected from outside our Solar System -"
How is this possible unless Voyager1 somehow reported it?
Or is this just a simple and too common grammatical error?

It's not considered a grammatical error anymore. It is an all too common way of making what could have been an unambiguous statement into an ambiguous one. This casual way of speaking and writing is a plague, but it seems unstoppable. Most people just puzzle out the most likely meaning and move on.

It would never have been considered a grammatical error. And language is, by its nature, often ambiguous. But if anybody actually had to "puzzle out" the meaning here, they've got much deeper problems to deal with.

rstevenson wrote:

Zoomer wrote:" ...because it is the first asteroid ever detected from outside our Solar System -"
How is this possible unless Voyager1 somehow reported it?
Or is this just a simple and too common grammatical error? :|

It's not considered a grammatical error anymore. It is an all too common way of making what could have been an unambiguous statement into an ambiguous one. This casual way of speaking and writing is a plague, but it seems unstoppable. Most people just puzzle out the most likely meaning and move on.

Zoomer wrote:" ...because it is the first asteroid ever detected from outside our Solar System -"
How is this possible unless Voyager1 somehow reported it?
Or is this just a simple and too common grammatical error?

Chris Peterson wrote:

Tszabeau wrote:
Surely, it is tumbling and not moving like a javelin through space, as depicted.

"Tumbling" means rotating around more than one axis. Some asteroids do tumble, but most do not. There's no particular reason we should expect this one to do so. And there is nothing in the image which suggests the direction of motion of the body. You are assuming it is "moving like a javelin", but it could be moving in any direction relative to its shape.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/tumble wrote:
tumble (v.) c. 1300, "to perform as an acrobat," also "to fall down," perhaps from a frequentative form of Old English tumbian "dance about, tumble, leap." This is of unknown origin but apparently related to Middle Low German tummelen "to turn, dance," Dutch tuimelen "to tumble," Old High German tumon, German taumeln "to turn, reel."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpolhode wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<A herpolhode is the curve traced out by the endpoint of the angular velocity vector ω of a rigid rotor, a rotating rigid body. The endpoint of the angular velocity moves in a plane in absolute space, called the invariable plane, that is orthogonal to the angular momentum vector L. The fact that the herpolhode is a curve in the invariable plane appears as part of Poinsot's construction.

The trajectory of the angular velocity around the angular momentum in the invariable plane is a circle in the case of a symmetric top, but in the general case wiggles inside an annulus, while still being concave towards the angular momentum.>>

Tszabeau wrote:Surely, it is tumbling and not moving like a javelin through space, as depicted.

Wayne Jepson wrote:My understanding, from the various articles I've read about this object so far, is that the only arguments supporting this being a natural 'asteroid' are:

1) it's trajectory can be defined solely by it's initial velocity and direction of motion, as influenced by the gravity of our sun during its close pass
(i.e. there is no evidence that its path is influenced by any sort of active, on-board propulsion system; it is adrift / tumbling in space)
2) it is red; and,
3) of course its natural, there's no such thing as aliens.

On the other hand, arguments for it not being "natural" include:

1) we are tracking over half a million asteroids in our solar system, none of them are known to have an aspect ratio as great as 10:1.
2) a spacecraft that is no longer functional could easily have a similar observed trajectory, you can speculate on how and when it achieved its observed velocity; and,
3) it is red. Why not paint your spacecraft red?

Anyone else have any further insights to add to either side of the debate?

JohnD wrote:InfinitiesLoop
Just THINK for a moment.
This object was moving faster than anything else in the Solar System, 315,000 kilometres per hour.

67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko's maximum velocity was 135,000 km/h, and the Rosetta mission was launched in 2004, to meet it in 2014, TEN YEARS LATER. It needed all that time for several 'sling-shots', three past the Earth and one past Mars to achieve rendezvous. There's a smashing animation of the process here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktrtvCvZb28

Now, how long have we known about Oumuamua? Since October 19th, this year. And it's moving more than twice as fast as 67P. Now, you answer your own question. Could we have set up a mission to catch, land on it and set up an obsevation post?
John

InfinitiesLoop wrote:
Someone mentioned it in this thread already, but I think it deserves discussion -- what is the feasibility of a mission to outfit a visitor like this with sensors? Why build a probe when nature has provided one? We'd have to match its speed to be able to land on it, perhaps at that point you don't even need to land on it anymore. So I suppose the trick would be in getting something onto it without having to match its speed, like a snare or something. The more I think about it the more untenable it sounds, but there's gotta be something to it. Plenty of comets and asteroids with predictable orbits to practice on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off_on_a_Comet wrote:
<<Off on a Comet (French: Hector Servadac) is an 1877 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story starts with a comet that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet. They form a mini-society and cope with the hostile environment of the comet (mostly the cold). The size of the 'comet' is about 2300 kilometers in diameter - far larger than any comet or asteroid that actually exists.>>
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The 36 inhabitants of Gallia include a German Jew, an Italian, three Frenchmen, eight Russians, 10 Spaniards, and 13 British soldiers. The main characters are:

* Captain Hector Servadac of the French Algerian army
* Laurent Ben Zoof, Servadac's aid
* Count Wassili Timascheff of Russia
* Lt. Procope, the commander of Timascheff's yacht, Dobrina
* Isaac Hakkabut, a German trader
* Nina
* Pablo
* Colonel Heneage Finch Murphy and Major Sir John Temple Oliphant of Britain's Gibraltar garrison.
* Palmyrin Rosette, the French discoverer of the comet and previously Servadac's teacher.
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<<From the beginning Verne had problems with this novel. Originally he intended that Gallia would crash into the earth killing all on board. This may have been the motivation for his ghoulish and rather unfunny joke naming the hero "Servadac" with the mirror of the French word cadavres (="corpses"), predicting all would die on the "return". His publisher Hetzel would not accept this however, given the large juvenile readership in his monthly magazine, and Verne was forced to graft a rather unsatisfying ending onto the story, allowing the inhabitants of Gallia to escape the crash in a balloon.>>

RocketRon wrote:

Spif wrote: If its incoming and outgoing trajectories seem to aim at the same star, that could be a somewhat convincing clincher.

incoming and outgoing trajectories are not consistent with this statement.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/file ... k=178v74Z7

RocketRon wrote:(If it was only sighted rather late, how was this path extrapolated ?)

Chris Peterson wrote:

RocketRon wrote:
Millions of years ??

With the distance it has to have come from - from even the closest possible star, and its (relatively) low speed,
it would more likely have been billions of years ago ?

It could be any long length of time. But millions of years is perfectly reasonable. We're talking about a body which is approximately co-orbiting with our own Solar System within the Milky Way. That means both us and it make a complete orbit around the center of our galaxy every 250 million years or so, passing or being passed by countless stars, rogue planets, rogue asteroids in similar orbits.

RocketRon wrote:Millions of years ??

With the distance it has to have come from - from even the closest possible star, and its (relatively) low speed,
it would more likely have been billions of years ago ?

Spif wrote:
Comes out of nowhere and pulls a nice tight slingshot maneuver well inside Mercury's orbit?

I'm starting to wish that maybe this thing just blew the Fermi Paradox away

If its incoming and outgoing trajectories seem to aim at the same star, that could be a somewhat convincing clincher.

But then that speed of 26kps is just not practical for interstellar anything... 50k years just to cover the distance of Alpha Centauri.