Re:Interstellar object ‘Oumuamua covered in 'thick crust of ...
by InclinedPlane on Monday December 18, 2017 @07:40PM
(#15956829)
We're talking about 200 years before the thing is even 1000 AU away. Even 100 years from now it will probably be comparatively trivial to send out a probe to visit the asteroid, let alone 200. Also, interstellar asteroids might be comparatively more common than we've seen so far, but given the basic factors of how widely separated stellar systems are it's quite likely that they are still very rare. So even if we have discovered many more interstellar objects traipsing through our Solar System over the next many decades I highly doubt we'll have so many that we wouldn't want to visit all of them.
That's a lot of confidence. This is the first interstellar object passing through imaged. However, we believe several of these objects pass through the solar system per year. Why haven't they been detected until now? We didn't have sensitive telescopes doing whole sky surveys like Pan-STARRS until recently. As more projects like LSST come online, we will undoubtedly discover more interstellar objects. And we will learn a lot more about them from Earth-based observations. Perhaps we will get to the point with telescope sensitivity where we can detect them years away so they intercept is simpler. But I do not share your confidence that we will send our first probe to explore interstellar objects to Oumuamua just because it was the first one discovered.