Can we do something much more grand and hope to see something, unlikely within our lifetime a full possibility? What great wonders of joy if this happens!
Oumuamua was such a remarkable event. Let's plan and have ready to launch and land on another Oumuamua-like visit. We just need to have it ready so that we can launch and land. It can then surf along a magical ride.
We should have ready also a relay system of nodes in space. This way it can readily relay back to the previous node(s) without it getting too far away from us.
Who is onboard this plan or, or possibly could one already be in process?!! I am happy to contribute a draft writeup.
> We just need to have it ready so that we can launch and land
This is like really really hard. Oumuamua was traveling through our solar system at about 87.3 km/s (relative to the sun, I think based on the link below). Earth travels around the sun at about 29.7 km/s. So if Oumuamua and Earth are traveling in the same plane (the is a REALLY BIG IF) then we still need to make up 57.5 km/s of delta V from a rocket. The fastest object we have ever launched from Earth was New Horizons which was launched with an escape velocity of 15.26 km/s and this was, generally speaking, a very light spacecraft launched on a very powerful rocket.
Now even with our more powerful rockets now, overcoming that difference in delta V is still incredibly difficult. To put it another way, in order to land something on the asteroid we already have to get it moving as fast as the asteroid. A more plausible mission would be doing something like Deep Impact that can still get an idea of what is going on in the composition of the comet. There was the "impactor" spacecraft that was launched from the main spacecraft and successfully collided with the comet. But it is less like we hit the comet with something and better to think about it as we got something in the way of the comet's path and the comet smashed in to it. As you might imagine getting something to survive this impact would also be incredibly difficult.
I'm no space expert but like to entertain the obstacles mentioned here (no pun intended =). I learned so much from your post already which is packed with useful information.
Okay, so let's say we can't overcome this delta V. This would be perspective from having a good relative speed to do a nice, graceful landing.
How about blowing (again no pun intended) right into it? Maybe some projectile form and it can stick to it without blowing the payload into pieces, a different challenge. Imagine either shooting a stick of gum with some payload at the car, or have the car run right into it. If you can't beat'em, join 'em :). I would call this project mosquito, except it doesn't get splat.
I see there is good production value in knowing more about the asteroid composition. What get's me excited is reaching far out into space we might not have thought of possible within our lifetime. Maybe attach a beacon along with it and who know's, maybe something else discovers it and it points right back at us.
Glad I can help! I always like teaching people about space stuff (that's obviously the technical term we use in the aerospace industry).
There would still be some serious engineering to have some sort of meaningful electronics (even just a comm beacon with a heartbeat) to survive that impact. A closer analogy might be trying to stick a piece of gum to a supersonic aircraft.
Lets take the Deep Impact as a reference starting point. From the mission data info on Wikipedia [0] the impactor collided with the comet at a relative speed of 10.3 km/s (23,000 mph) and the impact energy was estimated to be the equivalent of 4.7 tons of TNT. Getting something to just straight survive the impact is going to have to be really really tough.
The other option that I am just spitballing (many puns intended) is to get something that would hook the asteroid attached to the payload at the end of a very very long spool.
Step 1: you get the hook in to the asteroid/comet. This has its own challenges. The surface of asteroids and comets is often just very fine dust and small rocks (regolith) attached to the asteroid by it's own small gravity. So perhaps a gigantic net would be better, but again it still needs to be strong enough to survive that initial impact.
Step 2: Attached to the net/hook is a very very very long (like probably hundreds of kilometers long) spool of a very high tension wire that you start spooling out. Again this has to spool out at the relative velocity between the two objects. So something very low friction and probably some sort of active cooling radiator in order to take away the heat. There are missiles that spool out wire behind them to the thing that fired for guidance, i'm envisioning something like that but even crazier.
Step 3: The velocity of the spool starts gradually slowing due to the friction and the relative velocity between the asteroid and the probe. And eventually the probe is being pulled along behind the asteroid. You probably also need some sort of independent thrust and control system on the probe to prevent it from flying around wildly behind the asteroid or possibly smacking in to it again as the spool whips you around.
Step 4: Realize that for all of this effort you are only really traveling about 3-4 times faster than something like New Horizons and its still going to take you 4000 years to reach Proxima Centauri (the nearest star to the Sun) assuming you are pointed in the right direction.
The best shot we have at actually reaching another star system with current (or close to current) technology is something like Breakthrough Starshot. A tiny tiny satellite with a huge solar sail being continually propelled by a system of 100 GW lasers on the ground. The early concepts estimate that it could get to Proxima Centauri in ~30 years. But we've still got a lot of technical obstacles to overcome for this one.
I'd argue it would be pretty uninteresting to follow Oumuamua where it's going. It was traveling at 0.001% c and the nearest star is 4 light years away, so even if it was aimed directly at that star system, it would take 400,000 years to get there. Oumuamua is going to spend a LONG time cruising in the darkness.
Can we do something much more grand and hope to see something, unlikely within our lifetime a full possibility? What great wonders of joy if this happens!
Oumuamua was such a remarkable event. Let's plan and have ready to launch and land on another Oumuamua-like visit. We just need to have it ready so that we can launch and land. It can then surf along a magical ride.
We should have ready also a relay system of nodes in space. This way it can readily relay back to the previous node(s) without it getting too far away from us.
Who is onboard this plan or, or possibly could one already be in process?!! I am happy to contribute a draft writeup.