Interstellar Object Travelling Through Solar System: 1I/2017 U1 "Oumuamua"

Not manned, so unless the US has an advanced AI on board it, the best it could do is take some super snappy snaps.

 

Need a mission to that object, before it travels too far to be achievable Ina few decades.

 

Unfortunately, not possible with currently available tech:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/so-you-want-to-send-a-probe-to-catch-up-to-oumuamua/

 

Wished this would cause a new interest in developing new types of propulsion.

 

There's already plenty of such research being done. All the exoplanets we've discovered in other star systems have sparked a lot of interest in developing propulsion systems fast enough for interstellar travel.

And the idea of a flyby mission to 'Oumuamua has been proposed: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.03155

 

Or even old technology such as nuclear propulsion - Nerva or Orion type. However, the lead times to develop a probe, plan a mission profile and staff the venture are too long even for conventional propulsion missions. Hyperbolic trajectory objects heading into the solar system are very difficult to spot besides travelling at high velocities - as the Arstechnica link explains. Also I guess there is not sufficient flexibility in NASA's budget and manpower to drop everything and hurridly prepare an impromptu chase mission. It's just not how the agency is geared to operate. If the mission failed, it would likely attract a lot of criticism from Congress. In any case, a probe is unlikely to return anything except beauty shots of the object and the money might be better spent developing telescopic and spectroscopic instruments in Earth orbit that could serve many other useful research projects. Landing a probe to obtain samples and returning those samples seems out of the question.

 

Nerva would already be a step forward, not for hunting down Oumuamua but for general purpose freight training through the solar system.

 

Don't we have any telescopes in orbit that can take photos of this?

 

For a photo, scroll down here (past the artist's interpretation): https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=38834

There's another one here: https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/11/...terloper-is-dashing-through-our-solar-system/

Keep in mind, the thing's only about 800 meters long by 80 wide -- about the size and shape of three adjacent Manhattan blocks east to west, or of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai -- and it's over 200 million kilometers from Earth and getting farther. So don't expect a photo to be anything more than a fuzzy dot.

 

Fair enough.......

OMG imagine the fun had it been a real ET and stopped.

 

Maybe we're not as interesting as we think we are. Besides Rama, the described shape also reminds me of the Knights of Sidonia vessel. Hope they're not being chased by a Gauna.

ETA: Saturn's moon Iapetus shows a brightness variation of about a factor of 7 (maximum observed magnitude variation is 2.12 so the ratio is 2.512^2.12 = 7.04) and it is nearly spherical (apart from being squished slighly at the poles and having a strange equatorial ridge) so pethaps we shouldn't rush to judgement that the brightness variation of this object is solely due to its geometry.
Apologies for the inexplicably cheesy music:

I think I'd be more interested in knowing more about why Iapetus is the way it is. The same goes for Phoebe, which besides probably being a captured Kuiper belt object, is the likely source of the dark material on one face of Iapetus.

 

What was all that fuss last year about bright flashes of light from one of the outer planets moons, I think Ceres or something?

Did anything come of that?

 

Aliens: "Take us to your leader!"
Majority of the United States: "Only if you promise to abduct him."

Astronomers have been deducing the shapes of objects from their light curve variations for decades. They're old hands at this. Different shapes have different light curves, and astronomers use math and computer models to find the best match to whatever light curve they observe. And if there were a good chance that the light curve could also be explained by albedo variations, they would report that in their paper. Maybe they do, but it's behind a paywall, so I can't check.

Ceres is the dwarf planet in the Main Asteroid Belt, not a moon. There was some fuss over bright patches on its surface which were suspected of being snow/ice from cryovolcanism, indicating a subsurface water or ice layer. It's now believed they're deposits of salty brines that welled up from the water/ice layer below, so they were almost right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet)#Observations_by_Dawn

 

^Yeah, I'm not paying $100 or whatever it was to access the paper. I assume they must have discounted albedo variation by spectroscopic analysis, which shows up different composition acoss the surface of a body such as Iapetus.

 

Sounds plausible. They did report there seemed to be organic compounds on the surface based on its spectroscopy.

 

Not really surprising as organic molecules seem to be ubiquitous in the universe, in molecular clouds for example. As is water, no matter what old V and nuBSG used as a contrived plot point.

 

Standby Starfleet....we are picking something up the from glyph....its a small packet a few terrabytes in size...its transmitting from a small egg shaped capsule

Understood...beam it directly to cargo bay 214.

Beaming now.....


Vantablack, the closest color that has been created that does not allow light to escape.

"Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical tubes which are "grown" on a substrate using a modified chemical vapor deposition process (CVD). When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected among the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat."

Most of the time we think of large solar arrays collecting photons and then converting them into heat. But what if a SETI (Sentient Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) just a few hundred years more advanced than humans had incorporated a material similar to Vantablack into its energy harvesting and production systems?

A collector would function basically the same as a Thermoelectric Generator. The only difference is that a layer of Vantablack material would line the outside shell of the collector on all of its faces to collect as much light as possible from all directions.

The light is the bounced around inside of the vertically aligned carbon nano tube arrays where the light continually deflected among the tubs becomes absorbed and dissipates as heat.

The heat is then transferred to a heat application layer where it is then converted into electrical power.

This type of electrical generator would see a 100% power output with only a very small fraction of heat waste as most of the heat would be used to generate electricity.

I don't know if this possible or not but is there a method to determine how much light or heat is present within the centers of each dip that takes place while the transit occurs?

https://powerpractical.com/pages/how-do-thermoelectrics-work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

Such an array would create a lot of confusion like it has for Earth due to the reduced presence of Flux. But with a Vantablack material covering a TEG we can purposely assume that the reason why the Flux seems odd is because all of diminishing luminosity present because of the a Vantablack type material absorbing all photons that come into contact with the Vantablack material.

A Vantablack Swarm would seem even more feasible than a Dyson Swarm and even more efficient at collecting solar energy than a TEG Array around a Super Gas Giant would because the material would collect all light passing through the area the Vantablack Array was located at.

With this type of technology a star ship would never be without electrical power ever again. A star ship could reduce its mass by nearly 20% by replacing batteries that generate electricity to capacitors that store and transfer electricity.

Einstein said that it would take an infinite source of power to operate a starship....how much more power do you need if it not be all of the light of the heavens.

They called it Hope in the Darkness and all that does not glitter is gold.

 

^Do you intend spamming all the threads with this info? You've already created a thread about Vantablack and you really need to read up about thermodynamics.

 

Low albedo object...
High metal content...
Very low dust content around it...
Obling shape, about 40 meters wide by 400 long...
Yeah. I'm pretty sure this is an alien space ship.

And we'll never get a chance to confirm or even visit it ever again. Which just figures, ya know?

 

We'd

I wouldn't be surprised if the US commandeered a Space X falcon Rocket and stuck a couple of astronauts in the capsule being told to "Plant the flag on that thing before anyone else can! We'll figure out how to get you down later, don't you worry about that.....We can't let the Russians win!"