Manholes can weigh over 250 lbs (113 kg) [1]. Accelerating that mass to 25k mph takes about 7 GJ.
Brown dwarfs are around 10 ^ 27 kg. That takes sabout 10 ^ 11 GJ to get to 1mm mph.
To put that into perspective, the scale of the energy difference between these phenomena is so vast that were each GJ a second the interval it would define would span 32bn years, or roughly twice the age of the universe.
Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.
With more affordable sensor technology, citizen science has a huge potential to become a strong force just by being able to deploy a large number of people in a short time span.
However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately funded.
It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges like climate change and biodiversity.
Yes, but with the cost of lift dropping to dollars per kg, we could easily launch thousands upon thousands of short life, disposable sensor platforms away from Earth yearly, just in the spare space for some launches.
Such platforms need only cost hundreds of dollars each, and could even use crowd source designs. We could iterate fast, tey different designs, discovering what cheap build method works. They could be tiny, with nuclear batteries, or very small solar panels. Something along these lines would be far, far, far more effective than ground sensors, or Hubble, as they could be networked and would be effectively millions of km apart.
If even 90% of them died due to cheap design, who cares. If they only last a year, or even weeks who cares.
People spent billions on things like hubble, because it used to cost enormously to launch. It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex.
So our design and deploy methods should change too.
>It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex.
What innovation is expected to make this possible? The minimum amounts of fuel and oxygen necessary to leave the atmosphere are fixed, short of a chemistry breakthrough.
I don't think the person you're responding to was thinking of this, but off the top of my head is the spin-launcher which gives a rocket a "kick", giving it a decent buffer before it has to start worrying about Tsiolkovsky's tyranny.
This has been discussed for several years now. There are plans for thousands of Starship launches per year. Heck, there are plans to build thousands of Starships.
Starship can launch 200+ tonnes to orbit per launch. That's 200,000 kg metric tonnes. This is the point I'm trying to get across, access to space is about to become very, very, very cheap, and there's a lot of talk about it.
Everything is going to change at this cost level. Everything. All of these mega-expensive probes are going to morph into cheaper probes. It will be less expensive to experiment, to play, to try new things in space.
There are so many sectors in space I am envisioning getting involved in.
Heck, with costs like this even a YC startup could have the fiscal might to try experimental methods of mining asteroids.
SpaceX is in a particularly envious position, I can envision neuralink enabled astronauts controlling Tesla robots in SpaceX hardware, on site. EG, to reduce lag, and also provide strong direct feedback.
Experiments on advanced propulsion systems, especially theoretical ones, need not be "big big big". We can iterate. We can try 1000s of different designs, we can experiment without big budgets.
I want to see 100kg of mined ore, unrefined, lifted and automated, weightless methods to refine that ore tried. I want to see an immense range and scope of sensors tested, in space, never tried before. Space born solar panel construction methods tested. The list goes on and on and on.
I imagine lagrange points becoming congested with endless stations, sensor platforms.
We don't need asteroids back moved back to earth. Imagine latching onto an asteroid, with the ability to refine metal, you can simply build a station there! Multiple mobility methods have been pondered, solar sails, there are endless electrical engines, so multiple mass-driven methods of propulsion can be employed. Travel to/from such stations need not depend upon earth provided propellant, any molecule or atom can be shot out the stern.
The cusp of so many things is right on the horizon. The "Internet" age has landed in our laps ~ 2000, and in 2024 is now a saturated market, filled with an immense array of competitors, there is little "new" to be had here.
But space? Space is new, just as multiple biotech fields are new. There are enormous opportunities in space, and SpaceX and others following it its wake are building the backbone. We just need to build the "apps".
Hmm. I doubt so many people are that interested in science and also capable of making something.
Maybe as an off the shelf satellite as a hobby just like everyone bought drones for a while until all the laws came in. It'll be a cool gadget for a while and then everyone but the real enthusiasts will lose interest.
And is this really a good idea? Space cluttering is already a problem for astronomers. After Starlink, Project Kuiper and others launching 10.000s of says, do we really need the general population to go and mass-pollute space? Sure it will be short lived LEO stuff for sure but still..
Space is vast. Launching thousands upon thousands of small sensor satellites (we're talking SMALL) outward from the earth/moon system, is not going to even be noticeable.
What would be the point? Where would we send them? What would they do when they get there?
They can't be more effective telescopes than Hubble since they would be tiny, and it would be impossible to combine the images. Another problem is that they are too tiny to send radio back to the Earth.
How would we launch them? SpaceX gets them to Earth orbit. It would be expensive to get them to rest of Solar System. Sending out like Voyager probes would be harder that takes forever to get anywhere useful. Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
What would be the point? Where would we send them? What would they do when they get there?
Ask the same question about anything else we send into space.
They can't be more effective telescopes than Hubble since they would be tiny, and it would be impossible to combine the images.
I see nothing impossible about combining the images. Why do you deem it impossible? Further, what does size have to do with it? If I gather 1 metre wide of light from 1000 lenses, and mesh them, is that not better than Hubbles meager, tiny size? Well, I don't know yet. But I do know that I can launch 1000 satellites for under $1M, so maybe it's worth a test.
Another problem is that they are too tiny to send radio back to the Earth.
Huh?! Why on earth so? You can have receivers in orbit. You could have regional radio-only platforms to collect(again, small) and re-transmit. Antennas aren't big bulky things, wire mesh in space can be super light. Most of antenna weight on earth is to support itself.
How would we launch them? SpaceX gets them to Earth orbit.
There are multiple ways to move things from LEO to above. Did you miss the part about how cheap it will be to launch to orbit? LEO is solved, just scale for 1kg payloads, and see how easy it is to get them to escape velocity.
These things will be cheap, flimsy, minimally engineered. The goal is to iterate, and see what works. If 99% of them blow up, malfunction, break on the first try, you improve on the 1% that works for the next time.
Because it's cheap to try!
I feel your not viewing this through the optics of almost-free. Would you levy all these worries and concerns and such, if I was launching paper-folded boats onto a river, to see which survived the best? Because that's what this is. That's how cheap this is.
It would be expensive to get them to rest of Solar System
Why? It's not expensive to get things to orbit, it's cheap. That means everything is cheap, including fuel. Think of the future, not the past.
And in another post, I discussed solar sails, electric methods of propulsion, I have to repeat here.. this is fun, experimental playtime.
Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
You think it's impossible to get other objects to the speed we got Voyagers, a 1/2 century ago? This is a strange assertion. Regardless, I simply stipulated "away from earth", as in, the earth/moon system. There are immense advantages to that simple act.
And you're stuck on "hubble". It was an example. There are 1000s of other sensor platforms we can attempt, measuring all manner of things, looking for variations in physical laws, and validating assumptions we have.
The key part here is... there will no longer be a restriction on getting things to space (it used to take YEARS to get a launch window). There will be no cost barrier to getting things to space, none, nada. There will be the opportunity to experiment, cheaply, easily, on whims, instead of decades of research and then an attempt to validate at enormous expense.
Think of the possibilities. Stop thinking of the roadblocks, which often are mired in old-cost, old-launch think.
> I see nothing impossible about combining the images. Why do you deem it impossible? Further, what does size have to do with it? If I gather 1 metre wide of light from 1000 lenses, and mesh them, is that not better than Hubbles meager, tiny size? Well, I don't know yet. But I do know that I can launch 1000 satellites for under $1M, so maybe it's worth a test.
Does this work for non-radio telescopy? My understanding was that this sort of thing works great for intereferometry at certain wavelengths, and basically not-at-all with others.
Interferometry requires stable satellites and precise measurements of position. That require larger size for the stability and lots of sophisticated instruments.
Lots of little telescopes cannot see dim objects. Notice how much more the JMST is seeing over Hubble because of the larger mirror. There is minimum sensitivity of sensor and need to give it more light from big mirror. 1m mirror will never see a faint galaxy even if there is a thousand of them. Also, 1m mirrors are not cheap.
Mesh antenna would be useless. It needs to be a rigid dish of some size to reach across the Solar System. It also needs quite a bit of power to reach that far.
Solar sails and rockets take up space, quite a lot of space compared to payload. Your thousands of hundred dollar probes would be hundreds of hundred dollar probes attached to thousand dolllar rockets. There are also scaling factors where thinks don't work beyond certain size. SpaceX costs less because of mass produced larger size.
You are the one that brought up tons of little probes. Cheap access to space means lots of medium probes are feasible. But medium probes cost money which means less sensitive to cheap access to space.
> Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
This post is about interstellar object. I wasn't sure if you meant Solar System probe, one going that speed, or one going interstellar distances.
What you're missing here is, the way you change all of your concerns, is to game alternative solutions at small size, and then test them.
We literally could not cost effectively do so before. We can now.
With weekly launches and vigorous testing, issues can be knocked down. Dev paths can be tried. Yet the perception I'm getting on this side of the screen is "we cannot do that, it's impossible to ever do that, don't even ever try"
This is a recipe to halt all scientific progress.
I don't think this is your intention, but that seems to be your argument. EG, you're arguing from "we can't do this because currently we don't know how to", so "oh well, that won't ever work".
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
"If you could put the universe into a tube, you'd end up with a very long tube, probably extending twice the size of the universe. Because when you collapse the universe, it expands. And it would be-- you wouldn't want to put it into a tube."
The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood.
1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually escaping.
If you actually read the research paper linked in the article, it says the speed may exceed that of the escape velocity of the Milky Way, suggesting that it is not proven as fact yet.
I'm not being snotty. What is the fixed point from which they are measuring the speed? Is the object moving 1M mph relative to earth? The black hole at the center of Milky Way?
“Stellar engines are a class of hypothetical megastructures which use the resources of a star to generate available work,” for example, to “produce thrust [to] accelerate a star and anything orbiting it in a given direction” [1].
40 comments
[ 26.2 ms ] story [ 1202 ms ] threadhttps://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/the-fastest-man-made-o...
Manholes can weigh over 250 lbs (113 kg) [1]. Accelerating that mass to 25k mph takes about 7 GJ.
Brown dwarfs are around 10 ^ 27 kg. That takes sabout 10 ^ 11 GJ to get to 1mm mph.
To put that into perspective, the scale of the energy difference between these phenomena is so vast that were each GJ a second the interval it would define would span 32bn years, or roughly twice the age of the universe.
[1] https://theapecgroup.com/how-much-does-a-manhole-cover-weigh...
That's ~450 km/s, or 0.15% c.
Importantly it's also the first object discovered by this project that's unbounded to the Milky Way. Like ʻOumuamua in relation to the Solar system, it exceeds the escape velocity and will never return to the Milky Way.
However some of the problems is that it's not really recognized (yet) by academia and governments and thus also not adequately funded.
It would be great if there is a more systematic approach to citizen science but only in astronomy but also global challenges like climate change and biodiversity.
Such platforms need only cost hundreds of dollars each, and could even use crowd source designs. We could iterate fast, tey different designs, discovering what cheap build method works. They could be tiny, with nuclear batteries, or very small solar panels. Something along these lines would be far, far, far more effective than ground sensors, or Hubble, as they could be networked and would be effectively millions of km apart.
If even 90% of them died due to cheap design, who cares. If they only last a year, or even weeks who cares.
People spent billions on things like hubble, because it used to cost enormously to launch. It wil be as cheap to launch a kg to orbit in the next decade, as to ship a pacakge via fedex.
So our design and deploy methods should change too.
What innovation is expected to make this possible? The minimum amounts of fuel and oxygen necessary to leave the atmosphere are fixed, short of a chemistry breakthrough.
Starship can launch 200+ tonnes to orbit per launch. That's 200,000 kg metric tonnes. This is the point I'm trying to get across, access to space is about to become very, very, very cheap, and there's a lot of talk about it.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/01/how-will-spacex-bring-...
There are many other similar articles.
Everything is going to change at this cost level. Everything. All of these mega-expensive probes are going to morph into cheaper probes. It will be less expensive to experiment, to play, to try new things in space.
There are so many sectors in space I am envisioning getting involved in.
Heck, with costs like this even a YC startup could have the fiscal might to try experimental methods of mining asteroids.
SpaceX is in a particularly envious position, I can envision neuralink enabled astronauts controlling Tesla robots in SpaceX hardware, on site. EG, to reduce lag, and also provide strong direct feedback.
Experiments on advanced propulsion systems, especially theoretical ones, need not be "big big big". We can iterate. We can try 1000s of different designs, we can experiment without big budgets.
I want to see 100kg of mined ore, unrefined, lifted and automated, weightless methods to refine that ore tried. I want to see an immense range and scope of sensors tested, in space, never tried before. Space born solar panel construction methods tested. The list goes on and on and on.
I imagine lagrange points becoming congested with endless stations, sensor platforms.
We don't need asteroids back moved back to earth. Imagine latching onto an asteroid, with the ability to refine metal, you can simply build a station there! Multiple mobility methods have been pondered, solar sails, there are endless electrical engines, so multiple mass-driven methods of propulsion can be employed. Travel to/from such stations need not depend upon earth provided propellant, any molecule or atom can be shot out the stern.
The cusp of so many things is right on the horizon. The "Internet" age has landed in our laps ~ 2000, and in 2024 is now a saturated market, filled with an immense array of competitors, there is little "new" to be had here.
But space? Space is new, just as multiple biotech fields are new. There are enormous opportunities in space, and SpaceX and others following it its wake are building the backbone. We just need to build the "apps".
Maybe as an off the shelf satellite as a hobby just like everyone bought drones for a while until all the laws came in. It'll be a cool gadget for a while and then everyone but the real enthusiasts will lose interest.
And is this really a good idea? Space cluttering is already a problem for astronomers. After Starlink, Project Kuiper and others launching 10.000s of says, do we really need the general population to go and mass-pollute space? Sure it will be short lived LEO stuff for sure but still..
Space is vast. Launching thousands upon thousands of small sensor satellites (we're talking SMALL) outward from the earth/moon system, is not going to even be noticeable.
They can't be more effective telescopes than Hubble since they would be tiny, and it would be impossible to combine the images. Another problem is that they are too tiny to send radio back to the Earth.
How would we launch them? SpaceX gets them to Earth orbit. It would be expensive to get them to rest of Solar System. Sending out like Voyager probes would be harder that takes forever to get anywhere useful. Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
Ask the same question about anything else we send into space.
They can't be more effective telescopes than Hubble since they would be tiny, and it would be impossible to combine the images.
I see nothing impossible about combining the images. Why do you deem it impossible? Further, what does size have to do with it? If I gather 1 metre wide of light from 1000 lenses, and mesh them, is that not better than Hubbles meager, tiny size? Well, I don't know yet. But I do know that I can launch 1000 satellites for under $1M, so maybe it's worth a test.
Another problem is that they are too tiny to send radio back to the Earth.
Huh?! Why on earth so? You can have receivers in orbit. You could have regional radio-only platforms to collect(again, small) and re-transmit. Antennas aren't big bulky things, wire mesh in space can be super light. Most of antenna weight on earth is to support itself.
How would we launch them? SpaceX gets them to Earth orbit.
There are multiple ways to move things from LEO to above. Did you miss the part about how cheap it will be to launch to orbit? LEO is solved, just scale for 1kg payloads, and see how easy it is to get them to escape velocity.
These things will be cheap, flimsy, minimally engineered. The goal is to iterate, and see what works. If 99% of them blow up, malfunction, break on the first try, you improve on the 1% that works for the next time.
Because it's cheap to try!
I feel your not viewing this through the optics of almost-free. Would you levy all these worries and concerns and such, if I was launching paper-folded boats onto a river, to see which survived the best? Because that's what this is. That's how cheap this is.
It would be expensive to get them to rest of Solar System
Why? It's not expensive to get things to orbit, it's cheap. That means everything is cheap, including fuel. Think of the future, not the past.
And in another post, I discussed solar sails, electric methods of propulsion, I have to repeat here.. this is fun, experimental playtime.
Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
You think it's impossible to get other objects to the speed we got Voyagers, a 1/2 century ago? This is a strange assertion. Regardless, I simply stipulated "away from earth", as in, the earth/moon system. There are immense advantages to that simple act.
And you're stuck on "hubble". It was an example. There are 1000s of other sensor platforms we can attempt, measuring all manner of things, looking for variations in physical laws, and validating assumptions we have.
The key part here is... there will no longer be a restriction on getting things to space (it used to take YEARS to get a launch window). There will be no cost barrier to getting things to space, none, nada. There will be the opportunity to experiment, cheaply, easily, on whims, instead of decades of research and then an attempt to validate at enormous expense.
Think of the possibilities. Stop thinking of the roadblocks, which often are mired in old-cost, old-launch think.
Does this work for non-radio telescopy? My understanding was that this sort of thing works great for intereferometry at certain wavelengths, and basically not-at-all with others.
Lots of little telescopes cannot see dim objects. Notice how much more the JMST is seeing over Hubble because of the larger mirror. There is minimum sensitivity of sensor and need to give it more light from big mirror. 1m mirror will never see a faint galaxy even if there is a thousand of them. Also, 1m mirrors are not cheap.
Mesh antenna would be useless. It needs to be a rigid dish of some size to reach across the Solar System. It also needs quite a bit of power to reach that far.
Solar sails and rockets take up space, quite a lot of space compared to payload. Your thousands of hundred dollar probes would be hundreds of hundred dollar probes attached to thousand dolllar rockets. There are also scaling factors where thinks don't work beyond certain size. SpaceX costs less because of mass produced larger size.
You are the one that brought up tons of little probes. Cheap access to space means lots of medium probes are feasible. But medium probes cost money which means less sensitive to cheap access to space.
> Getting them up to speed of this object is beyond our technology.
This post is about interstellar object. I wasn't sure if you meant Solar System probe, one going that speed, or one going interstellar distances.
We literally could not cost effectively do so before. We can now.
With weekly launches and vigorous testing, issues can be knocked down. Dev paths can be tried. Yet the perception I'm getting on this side of the screen is "we cannot do that, it's impossible to ever do that, don't even ever try"
This is a recipe to halt all scientific progress.
I don't think this is your intention, but that seems to be your argument. EG, you're arguing from "we can't do this because currently we don't know how to", so "oh well, that won't ever work".
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28diameter+of+Milky+Wa...
https://youtu.be/FYJ1dbyDcrI?t=74
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021A%26A...649A.136K/abst...
The authors of that study cited above are pretty confident it's above 497 +/- 8 km/s, at least in the solar neighborhood.
1M Miles per hour works out to 446 km/s. Granted these are all rough numbers, and it depends exactly where you are in the Milky Way, but it looks like it may be a bit short of actually escaping.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad6607
Rest of the milky way galaxy, presumably, given that it talks about escape velocity from it.
(I don’t think it works with a brown dwarf.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine
"Not far now."
"Good, good, good..."