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am_Unition  ·  1646 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rama II officially named 2l Borisov

It's pretty clear to me that these things are just passing through our solar system all of the time, and we're only now getting the resolution to see them go by. It'd be absolutely stupid not to start awarding money for science advancement opportunities to probe them.

I talked to a guy yesterday who wants to build an entire fleet of spacecraft designed to study interstellar objects, and then park half of the spacecraft with the Trojan asteroids leading Jupiter, and half with the trailing Trojans. In this .gif, the Trojans are green:

Some automated stationkeeping (w/ radar, maybe?) would be required to avoid collisions, yes, but parking in the Trojans lets you then use a quick gravity assist from Jupiter to get outside of the ecliptic plane, where t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶s̶t̶e̶l̶l̶a̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ at gunpoint RAMA a̶r̶e̶ is going to be more often than not.

We'll send something up there to, ummmmmm, "make contact" in under ten years, in all likelihood.