[Meerax]

Is this something we could plan and manage to launch an orbiter/lander to in time? Has anyone thought about the possibility of slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?

[jessriedel]

If you launch your telescope on a spacecraft and get it to match speed with the dwarf planet (which is necessary for a soft landing), there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet. That just blocks the view of half the sky.

Also, there will be nothing to see out there other than the dwarf planet itself.

[tonmoy]

Is that really true? If we manage to get a spacecraft get captured by the dwarf planet's gravity and orbit it, would that not be a lot less delta-V compared to if we made the spacecraft achieve the dwarf planet's orbit around the sun just by itself?

[Teever]

> there's not much point in actually attaching it to the dwarf planet.

I've been thinking that attaching a sabatier reactor to a probe and sending it to land on an extra solar body such as Oumuamua that contains the ingredients that the sabatier needs to produce fuel would be a great way to get a probe that sends signals back to Earth well after a nuclear battery has died.

[vmception]

and frozen aliens

[bewaretheirs]

Just launch a deep-space telescope; it would be easier.

Soft-landing the telescope on an airless body would be harder (in delta-V terms) than just launching it into an equivalent solar orbit. And the body would block about half your view of the sky at any one time.

[jbay808]

Could you get a nice gravity boost away from the sun by just following it for as long as possible?

[elihu]

It's probably more interesting to study the object itself.

I assume its orbital period is long enough that it won't be back near the central solar system for a very long time. But similar objects could have interesting uses.

One thought experiment is to consider what it would take to be able to live on such an object, perhaps even a rogue planet just floating between the stars.

It would be very cold. Presumably you'd be reliant on nuclear fission or fusion for power, so you'd need a significant fuel supply that could effectively last indefinitely. And you'd want to have a ready supply of all the basic elements you need. Which seems more realistic the bigger the object is. Like, an Earth or Mars-sized rogue planet might be ideal.

[anfilt]

Like till it gets closer we dont even know if it would be suitable to put something like that on it.

Although it does seem like interesting idea.

However, we have sent probes much further than this object (aka the voyager missions).

So it would mainly be useful for studying this object. So a telescope would be less than ideal since we could always in theory deploy a telescope much deeper into space if we wanted.

[floatrock]

Interestingly, the voyager missions were also timed-events -- they were launched when they were because JPL realized it was a 1-in-175-year alignment of the outer planets that made it feasible to launch just a few crafts to visit the outer planets all in one go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

[mikeytown2]

Landing a telescope on it would only make sense if orbits around it are highly unstable (like our moon) and if the dwarf planet was geothermally active so energy on the surface would be "easy" to extract (which comes with it's own set of headaches). Orbiting it with a "big for space probes" camera would most likely give us more interesting data.

Using the plant as a Coronagraph if orbiting far out is another interesting idea, but using a near earth astroid would be a better idea as the telescope could be powered by solar panels they.

[mrandish]

> slapping something like a telescope on that and letting it beam back data and images from veryyyyy far out eventually?

While this object will eventually orbit pretty far away in a solar system context, I suspect that additional distance may not be vast enough to make a meaningful improvement in observations of targets at interstellar distances.

I'd love to learn if I'm incorrect but I've always assumed for interstellar observation, larger sensors and more sensors has better ROI than a more distant sensor, at least short of some substantial fraction of a light year. If we're going to dedicate a 100 ton Starship payload to interstellar observing I imagine going much farther out than the Moon's shadow may not be a good trade (eg fuel mass vs payload mass).

[z3t4]

Too far out from the sun and it wouldn't be able to re-charge using solar panels. Could put some kind of nuclear power plant on it though. And as others has pointed out, you would need to match the speed, so you could just as well use that power plus gravity assists to get far out. Landing on such a body would be really interesting though.

[ianai]

Probably the reason to orbit such a planet would be to help comms from a ground station on it.

11 AU though seems like quite the stretch right now but maybe if there were a fleet of Spacex Starships in operation…

[c3534l]

Apparently no one likes this idea. Here's mine: we nuke the planet and collect its smitherines for SCIENCE!

[015a]

Let's send some boosters out there, redirect it to earth, and make a second moon. Come on people, what ever happened to doing shit cause its fuckin' rad, do you know how cool another moon would be?!

[dancemethis]

A variation of this worked well for Final Fantasy XIV.