Back in 2017 a rather striking piece of astronomical news appeared, so striking that it even made the MSM. For the first time ever an interstellar object was seen passing through our Solar System. It was a chunk of rock and the astronomers named it ‘Oumuamua. By the time it was discovered it had already rounded the Sun and was headed back into the depths of space, never to be seen again.

To add to the news value was the fact that it was oblong, with rough estimates based on telescopic pictures, ranging from 100 to 1000m long and 35 to 167m thick, that the manner of its discovery was similar to that of the alien spacecraft in Arthur C. Clarke‘s 1973 SF novel Rendezvous with Rama, and that it had shown non-gravitational acceleration in its flight path.

Although this got the SF fans (and the MSM) excited for a bit, it was many times smaller than Clark’s Rama and the slight acceleration was easily explained by the outgassing that such objects experience when they get close to the Sun. It didn’t outgas enough to become a comet.

However, as in Rendezvous with Rama a plan has been hatched to catch it and investigate further, and if anything it’s wilder than the original news.

Over the years of reading about planetary missions, many of which have involved such flyby maneuvers, this is the most extreme I’ve ever seen, and the Gif above is a great depiction.

The plan is always to use the likes of Jupiter and other planets to speed up a spacecraft and slingshot them along to their ultimate goal, and this mission has one flyby of Earth that does so. But the next flyby is the exact opposite, using Jupiter to bring the spacecraft, Lyra, almost to a dead stop in space, so that it can then fall back towards the Sun and use that as the slingshot effect to put it on the tail of ‘Oumuamua, which by then would be 10.5 light hours away from Earth (about 7 billion miles or 11.3 billion kilometres) and traveling at almost 27km per second.

Planned to launch on June 7, 2030 it wouldn’t whip around the sun until mid-2034 and although it would race away at some 60km per second it still wouldn’t catch ‘Oumuamua until 2052!! The Voyager spacecraft are still operating after more than four decades in space and they were built with 1970’s technology, so Lyra (named for the constellation in the part of the sky from which it’s thought Oumuamua came) should be capable of lasting long enough to study the object.

Is it worth doing? I think so, simply because ‘Oumuamua is so unique. But of course the real question would be how different is it from everything we’ve seen in the Solar System, given that it’s not from here?