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Comment by magduf | Hacker News Reader

We can't look at 'Oumuamua any more, with any kind of spacecraft. It's headed out of the solar system. There's absolutely no way we could possibly put together a mission and build a craft and launch it and have it catch up with 'Oumuamua at this point. If we had something ready to launch now, it might be possible to catch up with it, but it would be years before we could have a mission ready to go, and we don't have the propulsion technology necessary to catch up with it after that much time.

This should have been a big wake-up call to have pre-made probe craft ready to launch to investigate anything odd that entered the solar system. But expecting humanity to be that fore-sighted is pure folly.

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Oumuamua is traveling at 26kps. For comparison the Voyager probes are traveling at around 17kps.

Even if we had a probe ready today it's already too far and moving too fast to overtake. Even if we had a probe ready when we first detected the object it would have been difficult to intercept with today's technology. It would have to be something like a Falcon Heavy already in orbit and ready to burn at a moment's notice with a tiny probe at the top for gathering the data.

So it follows we should have that, at all times. :-)

That payload is... a lot of teslas worth of cargo. It would need to be built in orbit. A project that size would definitely make a lot of jobs and require a major rebuilding of our space problem. So many downsides.

>Even if we had a probe ready when we first detected the object it would have been difficult to intercept with today's technology.

That's the other side of the problem: we didn't detect it until far too late. We should be able to detect objects of this size much, much sooner than we currently do. We're not looking very hard for them, so usually we end up seeing them after they've already whizzed by. There have been way too many times in the last decade or so when we're informed, "hey, we just barely got missed by some big asteroid, and we didn't even see it until it already went by the Earth!" That's just pathetic.

One of the Breakthrough Starshot probes could do a flyby and take some pictures.

Edit: although, that would involve pointing a 100 gigawatt laser directly at Oumaouma, which might disturb it.

>that would involve pointing a 100 gigawatt laser directly at Oumaouma, which might disturb it

Maybe that would cause it to turn around and come back.

“Oh so you think that’s funny earthlings? Just discovered laser pointers have we? Well guess what!”

If we build prototypes of the Breakthrough project probes in say 5 years there's a real possibility that we can catch it in a decade or two.

We can foresee our lack of foresight- so its not hopeless.

I'm sure there were some people who could foresee the lack of foresight before the collapse of Rome too. It didn't help them.

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