Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5maih wrote
Reply to comment by MaekusMikolous in Couldn’t we land on an asteroid that is passing through our solar system and use that as a vessel for interstellar travel? by [deleted]
Making the initial payload lighter so that you would be able to send a number of rovers to develop a more sophisticated operation, once actually on the object, rather than trying to land the entire operation there, all in one go. Which would require heavier payloads with = harder to get to such speeds.
Getting off the asteroid is just as much an issue as slowing down an independent spacecraft that has reached similar speeds and makes an interstellar journey. How do we slow down? Wouldn’t we need fuel and propulsion just as we got up to the same speed so to board the asteroid initially, or to slow down an independent spacecraft.
At least on an asteroid you can mine for the fuel and create a rocket.
MaekusMikolous t1_jd5pqa6 wrote
Okay, we can get up to the speed of the asteroid ourselves, we don't even need it!
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd5qf12 wrote
I explained it in other comments and I cba reiterating but I think there are more benefits than just matching it’s speed with a single craft
OnlyAstronomyFans t1_jd5xqis wrote
Why wouldn’t you just stay in the ship that you built that already had enough Delta V to escape the system? I see what you’re getting at but why would you want to do it? The thing would be moving so fast you would spend so much energy trying to catch up to it then you’d have the complication of trying to land on it and hope that it fits your needs. All those pictures you saw of those previous interstellar objects were just artists depictions. Nobody could image them well enough to know what they were made of or what their spin rate was, really anything about it, other than its speed and trajectory.
Unless we’re already really good at interstellar travel, what you just described is the suicide of whatever crew was on that ship
Majestic_Pitch_1803 t1_jd62vkq wrote
A quick answer would be protection from space debris. More land with which to make the space craft more reinforced and with which to potentially build further technological instruments, or even live on if that was a possibility.
Even so. It could provide avenues for slowing down the payload once reaching the destination. If you could mine for fuel, that’s a win.
OnlyAstronomyFans t1_jd64lq3 wrote
This is going to be my last response to you because I am positive that you’re trolling us, trying to get karma so you can post spam in other subs that have rules about new accounts posting.
That said but the only reason anyone would do this would be because they wanted themselves and all of their descendants to live on that asteroid forever. You would need insane technology just to get to the interstellar object, let alone land and mine it. For sure it is not anything that would happen in either of our lifetimes. Fairs seas, my little troll.
Nopants21 t1_jd64187 wrote
I think you're imagining a much larger asteroid than what is common. Oumuamua was at most a kilometer long and it was considered a large enough object. Most fly-through objects are much too small to be mined productively and also hold together well enough to act as shielding.
On top of that, the amount of stuff you'd need to mine it is also much larger than you might think. You need refining, production, maintenance, energy, and the rovers you're sending need precision tools to create precision installations. Think of the amount of mining that goes into making a single rocket on Earth, it requires several countries working together for every rocket launch, each with a power grid, an industrial base, a workforce, etc.
As a last point, if the object is going fast enough, staggering your operation so that it's not all in one go makes it so that everything needs to occur in a short timeframe, because the object is zipping out of the solar system pretty quick. By the time you see the object, calculate where it's going, get everything organized, you might have missed it.
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