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Why dont we have probes on the ready for events like this? Ready to launch via Falcon Heavy on say 2 or 3 months notice. It doesnt seem unreasonable.
Why dont we have probes on the ready for events like this?
Why dont we have probes on the ready for events like this?
“Events like this” is a really nebulous target.
Going out 27 million miles on a polar trajectory on very little notice (so no time for any orbital assists) is not a generic mission. What is the probe supposed to do when it gets there? A fly-by? Collect samples and return?
It doesnt seem unreasonable.
It doesnt seem unreasonable.
A few billion in funding should be enough. You can take up a collection. Or you could run for public office on a promise to make funding for space probes a top priority. You’ll get the space-nerd vote. Good luck.
With today’s technology, all you could hope to do is do a fly-by, possibly crash into it, and/or collect samples from the plume. Landing on it like the Hayabusa mission would be impossible because the comet is going way too fast.
In order to visit extraterrestrial objects, you don’t just have to get to the same location but also to the same speed. This thing came in from way beyond Pluto so in order to catch up to its speed, you would need the same amount of energy as what you would need to… get way beyond
On the contrary, if Congress WAS getting really high every days they’d be all “Oh fuck, its time to go to SPACE boys.”.
Nothing else would get funded. Just shitloads of rocketships and weed.
ESA and JAXA are working on one. Approved in 2019 and set to fly in 2029. https://www.esa.int/Science_Ex… [esa.int]
But, instead of launching the rocket when we know a comet is coming this will wait at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2. Where JWST is at if that helps place it. In that little saddle of gravity it’s easy to slip off into any other direction for an intercept.
NASA did something similar in the 80’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… [wikipedia.org]
There was a crowd funded effort in 2014 to eek out another mission for it. G
“The Plough Constellation” == The Big Dipper.
Is that near the Angel Constellation and the planet Fhloston?
Everyone batten down your kitchen appliances and put boots on your cars.
European cars already have boots. It’s only American ones that go around wearing trunks.
The stone age lasted until 6000 years ago in some places ( as recently as 250 years ago in Australia).
The comet has been gone for fifty thousand years, an order of magnitude longer, and more like the time that humans first spread from Africa to Asia.
This is not the fault of the article’s author, but the scientifically illiterate editors at the Guardian and Slashdot, who translated “Neanderthal” as “Stone age”.
Since it’s apparently so difficult to post a map and all the silly newspapers write as if they’re still in the age of the printing press and can’t embed something online:
https://theskylive.com/c2022e3… [theskylive.com]there’s how to find it from whatever your current location is. The interactive sky chart in the first box seems the most useful.
Then again you’ve got websites in *2023* that you STILL can’t fucking post an image either.
How 1995 is that posting code?
I think we can safely say the comet will not be doing a fly-by of the pole star as Polaris is about 323 light years away from where the comet will be (and presumably always has been for that matter).
The Plough constellation is not visible in the United States. Not even the Plow constellation is visible. There is a similar constellation, however, known as the Big Dipper, not to be confused with the Big Bopper, whose star has long dimmed.
Slashdot is not United States only. People in the united island kingdom do call it the plough. It’s in Tolkien also Valacirca, or the plough to the hobbits. It is also the Great Bear, Ursa Major, Odin’s Wain, the Wagon, and others. Of these are visible in the US.
The world ends sometime during the night
Complete coverage on our Morning Show…along with sports, traffic, and weather !
The last time this comet came around was the Stone Age. To give an idea of how old the planet is, this comet has had time to visit Earth over 90,000 times!
I don’t know if it was actually orbiting at all that far back, but that’s the time scale. This uses the Wikipedia quoted age of Earth at 4.543Bn years.
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