Starship Asterisk*

APOD Robot wrote:are consistent with it forming naturally around a normal star many millions of years ago

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

heehaw wrote:"passed unusually close to the Sun for something gravitationally unbound." I've never understood how it can be that so many comets come so very close to our sun. Can anyone explain it to me?

Spif wrote:That 6 to 1 aspect ratio looks suspiciously unnatural?

No ice or dust ejecta near the sun. Hmm.

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

heehaw wrote:"passed unusually close to the Sun for something gravitationally unbound." I've never understood how it can be that so many comets come so very close to our sun. Can anyone explain it to me?

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.

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 ?

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:

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 ?)

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.>>

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