83 likes and it makes no sense whatsoever... let me look it up... ah, plant trees that you will never sit under, because a.) you will die before they offer shade -- you are taking care of the future, or b.) you will move on, and you are enhancing the area anyway, just on blind principle (though broader survival would be a more intelligent reason).
Leaving a comment here in case, by any chance, any mission is launched towards it. I probably won't be alive when it reaches it, so good luck and I hope it was worth it o7
Amazing how years later yet it manages to push space industry further. I don't know if people perceived it that way, but it's a huge milestone the mere fact we are just talking about different approach and analysis frames.
It always happens the same way, unfortunately science and development won't happen until money is interested, and money isn't interested until people are.
We need to rebuild our economy around space, not build space around the economy. People always worry about the cost of missions, thinking of it like a pile of cash we're burning. But that money goes to people and businesses. If we spend 5 billion dollars on a space mission, that's 5 billion straight into the economy. That money goes to the engineering companies and their employees, and in turn it goes into other sectors of the economy that those companies rely on like transportation and fabrication, and down the line it goes. What we should be doing is we should be shoveling all the money we can into our interstellar endeavors, and let the rest of the economy pivot to pick up and live off the stream of wealth that it generates. If we did that, then the kind of advancements we'd be able to make would be unbounded. We could launch missions on a whim without delay. Think about it.
There’s a deep fulfillment in knowing we’re part of something that extends beyond our lifetime. Watching efforts like these reminds us of the quiet but profound power in actions that benefit others-even if we’ll never see the final outcome.
It's hardly a sign of maturity to send billion dollar probes after any shiny object passing planet earth. Most likely, there's not much to see anyway. There will be others.
@@dan8910100 Indeed you can't. At least the scientific community gets it. Common goals and the pursuit of knowledge, no matter where you're from or what your personal believes are, working together towards a goal. Seems like the best place to start no matter what the obstacle. Cheers.
@@GAIS414 You're saying that using a billion dollar to make a slightly faster smart phone or a slightly better advertising algorithm is somehow more productive. Out of all the things you could be doing with your billions of wasted hours of human productivity, looking at rocks is probably near the highest on the list, along with curing cancer and all that other typical science stuff.
When the flyby happened, especially when the object accelerated, I remembered a story (Pirx's Tale) from Stanislaw Lem, where Pilot Pirx, on a scrappy space hauler with a dysfunctional crew (part ill, part stoned, part drunken) detects a huge spaceship, possibly millions of years old, crossing his path at hyperbolic speed. Everything he tries to record the encounter, or to transmit coordinates, fails due to malfunctioning instruments and unavailable crew, and the alien ship is passing by undetected and unnoticed by anyone except him.
Have to give a shout out to the Initiative of Instellar Studies at 5.39, if you check there webpage they have in house artists, one of them is David A Hardy, who is 88 years old! in 1954 at the age of 18 he became an illustrator for a book by Patrick Moore!!! wow, any Sky at Night vitage fans? that takes you back eh?! Anyway David A Hardy....wonderful stuff..from Birmingham!
It is a huge asteriod and a piece of the debris field of Tiamat, the 1st planet to cross Earth as a part of our Sun's binary solar system..Carlos Munoz' Ferrada's Herculobus..
I think it's a better bet to keep an eye out of for objects like this and time a mission where a probe could intercept it rather than chase it. It has been done with comets already with great results.
Thanks for another excellent video Alex. In my opinion, chasing Oumuamua would be a great waste of time and money. However, for any new and similar type object in the future that might be worth pursuing, the Solar Oberth Manoeuvre would be the best method for such a mission. But you neglected to mention that - after executing the manoeuvre - the heavy heat-shield could then be ejected, opposite to the flight vector and effectively act as extra reaction mass, thereby further increasing the craft’s Delta-v. Additionally, after ejecting the heat-shield, and at a sufficient safe distance from the Sun, a Solar Sail could be unfurled, which would also considerably increase the acceleration of the spacecraft. Many thanks and All the Best. Paul Conti, Wales (UK).
Sounds like we need some robust plans for generic but well rounded probes that can be "quickly" assembled and sent out... you know... several types of them for these purposes. That way when we get a surprise like that, we can get it together and send it out... but that's a lot of work, like you mentioned, without a destination...
Yeah, this is the kind of thing that's much more convenient when you have 'patrol' probes already perched in an orbit where they can pick up a lot of speed in a variety of directions on short notice... but it's a BIG ask getting someone to spend their budget on a probe designed to wait around for its entire lifespan HOPING a valid target passes by years after launch, HOPING it will be on a trajectory the probe is equipped to intercept, and HOPING the probe still works correctly when/if its chance comes.
@@05Matz Yes!! Yes!! Let's enter the realm of Star Wars or Star Trek and remote probes being launched. While we're at it, let's just go ahead and build a Death Star. Complete with shuttle craft, a planet killing laser system and whatever else it had. More nonsense proposals to gather data that doesn't get you anywhere or do much for you other than gathering that data and what it is. Yes. Spend billions upon billions. We have to!! It's a must! Top priority! If we don't know what it is or where it came from, it will be the end of humans forever!! Patrol probes. Lol. So laughable and ridiculous. You guys absolutely just luuuuuuuv living in fantasy lands and trying to Star Trek/Star Wars to reality.
Chemical rockets don't have enough power, but we have options. Nuclear electric would be helpful, mainly to decelerate over years as it approaches. Nuclear thermal if you're impatient.
Data that in the end isn't much use to the average person. Nor does it solve any problems here on Earth. It's all just another way to spend billions upon billions of dollars because as they always say (like you do), "we have to find out" or "we have to know". Because god forbid we don't know what it actually is, where it came from, etc. Oh the horror!! Yes, let's allocate $10 Billion right now for a mission so that all the engineers and scientists at NASA can justify their salaries.
Thank goodness im not the sharpest tool in the box because we would still be without the wheel if I was. Im staggered just what is now possible thanks to a lot of very clever people.
I think it might might be a metal piece with some unknown molecular bandage , probably a left over of an explosion . Its trajectory amd the angle of its journey really made us think all these but it’s not an alien sent object or shape that is meant of long interstellar journey or can generate power of its own .
Worth doing. The expense is not going to be in launching the probe, it's going to be monitoring it all that time. Still, worth it. It's not like it won't collect data as it goes out. Also, we're in an era of drastically dropping prices for mass to orbit. Lots of these "yeah, but we'd have to have something huge, so no" missions will start to become at least a consideration. Falcon Heavy didn't initially fly much because nobody designed a probe that needed the lift capacity. Now they are and New Glenn, Vulcan, Terran R, and Astra's rocket 4 ... Oh, and Starship ... will allow people to go even bigger. Bigger or more often. Both are good. Anyway, Eventually we'll send a probe and eventually the labor cost to monitor the probe will be more of a consideration than the cost of the probe or the initial launch. That's going to open up a lot of possibilities.
Space exploration is always economically viable. People get paid to design, build, and manage those missions. The money isn't loaded into the spacecraft and launched into the void. No matter who profits the money stays here on earth, in the economy.
could we catch up to it? possibly, it would be a major risk with a very VERY high reward if so. but is it worth the money it would cost to do so. no and i'll explain why, the composite of oumuamua is going to be nearly the exact same as the asteroids we would see here. the composition would be nearly identical to terrestrial asteroids. it would be mostly water ice with some possible methane, and some other slightly harder elements that help it to make its form. again its a big risk with a big reward if we do but we already have a good understanding of what its likely made of. its just the specifics is all we are really wanting to know.
And that in the end doesn't help us in any way, shape or form. Not a single person can rationally explain why following it, studying it and knowing about it is relevant or worthwhile. All anybody says is "for humanity" and somehow we have to know all about it just because. But it doesn't change a dam thing here on earth or in anyone's life in any relevant way.
@@biomerlreminds me of an origin from the game Stellaris, a planet in your solar system was destroyed, and the xenophobic faction of your empire thinks it was an attack and decides to retreat on the other planet of your binary system *Turns out they were right*
Presumably the actual position of oumuamua was tracked for a long time and used to derive the anomalous acceleration. Is there a relationship between that acceleration and distance from the sun? Perhaps even an inverse square law suggesting the acceleration was caused by solar radiation somehow? If so then Occam's Razor implies that it's a natural phenomenon. Otherwise there is indeed a mystery. Sounds like an obvious question and I'm sure people are going to say that scientists have already thought of that. But all I've heard is that there was an anomaly. I've never seen a function of that anomaly plotted against time or solar distance. It would be very interesting to see that.
So you're doing it to show off and to say that we achieved this. Nevermind it's not really useful data in the end. Yea, you know this and that but ok great, then what? What do you do with that info exactly? Study it for years on end? Ok, great. Then what? See, you keep ending up in this dead end sort of place that it's all nice to know and everything but it isn't really relevant to anything or anybody here on Earth. Doesn't solve any problems nor does it help us in any substantial way. But you end up spending billions, that you don't have mind you.
@ I know that....I'm talking about the event...it is 6 years old....no one was talking about this recently m...and suddenly a news popped about it after so long...just when I was searching for it
Years ago this was my goto astronomy channel.. now whenever I check in I have to listen on x1.5 to get past the fluff. Intended to be constructive comment.
Its 19,342,228,920.68 kilometres away from earth now... approximately... working on exactly 7 years. This will NOT happen.... it's apparently travelling at 87 kilometres per second, not the 26 you said.
Chasing Oumuamua seems like a waste of time, resources, and money. I would suggest that rather than going after Oumuamua, we work on be better able to detect interstellar objects before they reach the Solar system so they can be studied. We didn't detect Oumuamua before it was already on it's way out.
Well, first of all it will help us develop better tech, and second This is our version of cathedrals, we need a grand spectacle every once in a while, we need to do things to show that we can do it, because we are humans, we want to be more
So you want to miss a chance in a millennium? Oumuamua could potentially be an alien spacecraft or something completely unknown. Even if it's just a rock, it's from a solar system that is alien to us.
I still say that it's a planetary "shard" ... a splinter in other words. I was more concerned about the "off-gassing" that it did in our "Habitable -zone" than it's supposed acceleration. ..... Catching it will be a need to chase it without planetary-acceleration -assist , if we want to catch up before the Kuiper-belt.
I think NASA misses the point when saying its not necessary to catch Oumuamua by saying there are "estimated an interstellar interloper, similar to Oumuamua, passes through the inner solar system, once per year" - misses the point.. I find the reason its interesting to catch up to Oumuamua is to find out why it accelerates. If its the first interstellar object we've seen, I don't see how NASA can say another similar object will come with that certainty... Or.. I guess they can.. I just want to know if its an alien space ship :P
Well at least the unusual shape might be explained as a large, metal-rich shard of sedimentary layer blasted away from an ancient celestial impact in another solar system.
Have always thought alien craft would be made from rock and stone, the stuff lasts for millions of years. Some rock even has magnetic and thermal properties.
Why not? The U.S. military talked about manufacturing aircraft carriers out of icebergs, or an ice and sawdust composite, during WWII. The idea was abandoned, not as impractical, but as of limited utility due to such a vessel’s operating area being limited to the Arctic. Had we gotten an earlier start, they could have been immensely useful as a virtually unsinkable airbase with which to protect convoys in the North Atlantic.
@@richardletaw4068 it was the brits not the americans look up project habakkuk, it also was shelved due to impracticality since they were already in the process of building better carriers
@@richardletaw4068 It was a British project and it was abandoned exactly because it was impractical. It was to operate in the mid-Atlantic in temperate waters, which pykrete (the ice-sawdust composite) is capable of withstanding. The issue was that you could build several conventional aircraft carriers with the amount of steel needed for a refrigeration facility large enough to produce the pykrete in a reasonable timeframe. I think in the context of space travel rock could be an effective and extremely cheap method of shielding against radiation, the problem is it's quite heavy so may only really be useful for space stations that don't need to worry about payload capacity and fuel efficiency etc.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid catching up to Oumuamua will never happen. By the time we decide and figure out the best way to do it, it'll be too far gone. Secondly, world governments don't care enough to fund such an expedition.
The US is broke if you haven't noticed. It's not like we can take it out of petty cash to fund it. $35 Trillion in debt and counting. Soaring actually. A trillion every few months now. But yea, let's spend a few billion more just for the hell of it.
It was just checking in on the whales, no worries. 😜 On a more serious note though, trying to chase it down at that speed and distance doesn’t really seem worth it to me…. 🤔 Better to wait for another case imho. (Besides, even if this was our one chance to prove that aliens exist, then they probably would have changed course by now anyway…. 😅)
Given its shape and reflectiveness, is it not probable that it acted like a solar sail? It could have approached with a narrow edge facing the sun and its broad side facing the sun as it travels away from the sun?
Should similar objects enter our system in future, would it be possible and practical to attach a tiny radio beacon so that we could find it at will at any point in the future should we then decide to do so? Just brainstormin’ here…
And then what? Ok so you know it's over there. And? You going to chase it down? For what purpose? To find out what it is, what it's made of, where it came from? Why? What does that tell you and how does that help you in the end? How does it help us here on Earth? Seriously. It's a very valid question. Or is it another one of these, let's just do it because we can/want to and spend some money we don't have to keep a bunch of people employed at NASA type of thing? I'm brainstorming for valid reasons to do this. Thinking about the endgame. Not coming up with anything relevant.
I think hitching rides on celestial objects with lots of power options for ongoing data retreival and images from wherever it goes would be amazing.. Turning it them all into observitories
We don't have the tech to catch up with it. It's long gone, and we've lost track of it. It's a nice idea, but it's not feasible with what we have to work with unfortunately.
As with most space short proposals, I just wonder how this one could ever convince the holders of public money to fund it. The advancement of human knowledge is a noble aim yes but in a world heading for its self inflicted demise, knowing things that have absolutely no tangible beneficial impact on the human condition surely should be shelved.
Took a month to notice it, by then it was passed and long gone. No chance to notice anything coming our way heh, considering we about to re-enter the galactic dense disk, i`d say this was just the 1st of many in the following many many years. Who knows how many more we might have missed..
Since he talked about money and resource of the mission, it's a shame that the US spent money worth 200 JWSTs(JWST cost about 10B USD) and 20 years in Afghanistan to replace taliban with taliban, imagine if all the money time manpower go to space exploration, we may already having mars manned base now
Imagine they launch these missions to catch up to Oumuamua, spending billions to get there and then when they finally do it just hits the gas XD I mean I guess at that point we would know Lol.
It feels so obvious to me this thing was just a contact binary that split off so not sure what I am missing that leads people to believe its anything other. It comes in with one mass, leaves with another causing acceleration due to mass that was ejected going in a different direction. One side was fresh rock and white and the other dark red theolin( sp?) . It was at the galactic rest frame, meaning likely a rubble pile contact binary. Dark red surface due to organics is common. Basically it looked like Arakoth only to split when it got to the sun altering direction and providing strange light curve. Seriously, whats wrong with this hypothesis because it feels intuitively obvious.,
Wasnt there a radio spectrometry done Omumua or something similar? I remember maybe 1 or 2 years ago there was something floating around about it being the result of a planetary collision and it having a comet tail of non visible Nitrogen. Im not good with chemistry so if im wrong sombody please correct me.
I am barrelling in an elliptical manner around a sound which barrells even faster around a supermassive black hole, and I'm supposed to be the static one?
