Cigar-shaped object from another star

Curious as to how close it got though - or if it's even true - can't seem to find that with a glance.

Says 0.09 AU on it's wikipedia page (Earth MOID)

Thank you, missed that somehow.

...Not particularly close then.

the only dildo that can satisfy your mother

It's a penis.

snooPING AS usual, I see

Yeah but from 20 light years away. That's exceptional aim. Also if it was a fly-by mission that pretty much a perfect distance. Wouldn't want to get too close and risk hitting the thing. I'm pretty sure that Breakthrough Starshot plans to intercept the Alpha Centauri planet at pretty much the same distance.

With our tech, we could land a satellite right on that quarter-mile long in five years - and there's actual plans for just that in the works.

So I somehow think an interstellar civilization could manage to miss the Earth safely without taking that wide a birth.

Unless, you know, they're *trying* not to be spotted.

This thing is moving very fast (200,000 mph) why not track more of these things and use them to hitch a ride to the outer solar system?

Cuz we can go faster:
arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1711/1711.03155.pdf

Never mind the fact that it's the first one we've ever seen, and it'd take hundreds of thousands of years to get us anywhere.

Won't it be gone by the time we launch the satellite?

Nice logo.

See - should be possible to catch up.

>They didn't name it Rama
I'm still mad.

>Hitch a ride
>Have to use fuel to match velocity and then waste more fuel to land on it
Landing on it to get some samples would be a good reason to go. I bet there are some people salivating at the chance to look at that object up close.

>Cuz we can go faster:
>arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1711/1711.03155.pdf
>Never mind the fact that it's the first one we've ever seen, and it'd take hundreds of thousands of years to get us anywhere.

Why did they wait until it passed? Seems like a waste of fuel to not get there when it's really close or even during approach, so you'd just have to match speed and not catch up.
Or was the object only discovered when it was already too late to launch anything at it?

We ain't got no ship capable ready to go.

>Or was the object only discovered when it was already too late to launch anything at it?
It was discovered after it already passed us by, and it's rather a miracle we did catch, when you consider we've only found about a quarter of the similarly sized rocks that are near us all the damned time.

I know right?

There are habitable planets where it came from (Lyra)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-62

>I bet there are some people salivating
probably women

>That's exceptional aim.
Not really. Consider that it's much easier for us to spot those things when the come close. If it had passed by Jupiter we would likely never have realised it was there.
We've only really just gained the capability to spot things like ʻOumuamua, so it's too early to say how uncommon it actually is.

>Why did they wait until it passed?
We didn't know it was there until it had passed. And even if we did, it would have still taken years to build and launch something capable of getting to it.

>There are habitable planets where it came from (Lyra)
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_in_Lyra
That's not really much of a coincidence. Lyra contains a bunch of stars, and potentially habitable planets appear to be relatively common.
It's quite possible that every patch of sky something could come from has at least a few potentially habitable planets.

>We ain't got no ship capable ready to go.
Not that we have one that can catch this thing even built - but it would be nice if we kept a rocket and probe on standby for easier to catch events like this.

Dunno how expensive it'd be to maintain such a program.

SFAIK, we don't even do that for unexpected near Earth asteroid collisions, so I don't see us doing it for unexpected science.

This is why we shouldn't be negative debbie downers
>We will never land on an interstellar object in our lifetimes
Now look what happened. Maybe one day we'll get a chunk of a habitable planet floating by.

>That's not really much of a coincidence
Yeah but still it raises the possibility of you-know-what.

False hope for the destruction of humanity?

Why would aliens want to destroy us? We are harmless for them.

Isn’t this the perfect way to make your probe have camouflage? Hollow out an asteroid, turn on cryosleep, cruise on out into space and turn everything off but life support. You have to at least consider it.

Think ya'd make it a less unusual shape.

wow I never saw what's above and below the solar system

This poster is an alien

Maybe they know we're going extinct, thus don't care, and just wanna snap some pictures in a fly by.