[EspadaV9]

With the number of interstellar objects being detected only going up, it would be amazing if we could get some probes to hitch a ride on them. Imagine something lasting as long as Voyager 1 but travelling 3.5x the speed as it leaves the solar system.

[kqgnkqgn]

Visiting one with a probe would surely be amazing in it's own right...but hitching a ride would mean matching velocities with them. And if you can do that...you're already in the same orbit, so the comet doesn't really help.

[themgt]

There's disposable FPV drones that launch with 50km spools of kevlar cable. Seems like smart people could work out a way to "hitch" a probe on a comet without fully matching velocities first.

[signa11]

matching velocities till you can hitch the ride. from that point onwards, you can just do…nothing (at least in that department)

[pandemic_region]

The comet having virtually unlimited fuel would be of great help.

[actionfromafar]

At first I thought, "no silly, it has to gain matching speed first, what's the point". Then it occurred to me - if we can make something which can survive the impact, we "just" have to place it in the path of the comet and it will be swept with it.

The whole thing would be like something like shooting a bullet at a moving target, but it's an idea.

That hypothetical probe will not look anything like any other space probe before it, but more like an artillery shell. (They can survive pretty damning Gs and still run that little embedded computer, so it's not a completely insane idea, I guess.)

We would also have to detect the interstaller object plenty in advance, so the probe can be launched "comfortably" in a trajectory which will intercept at exactly where the "object" is going to be.

[thegrim33]

Some quick prompting seems to say a G force of somewhere between 16-160 billion Gs, for a CPU-equivalent object getting hit by a solid object moving at 3I's escape velocity. Compared to a "typical" artillery shell of 10-15 thousand Gs. Not sure you're manufacturing anything that could survive 6-7 orders of magnitude more Gs than an artillery shell.

Of course the G-load would lessen based on how much you sped up to match its speed beforehand, but still, I think you'd need to be pretty much sped up to near the same speed as it before you could remotely possibly survive the impact.

[bmiekre]

I would guess there all kinds of technical logistics reasons as to why this is improbable, but I agree that would be really cool.