NASA To ’Oumuamua? The New 22 Year Mission To The Extraordinary Object Said To Be An ‘Alien Solar Sail’

You remember ’Oumuamua? In 2017 astronomers detected, for the first time, an interstellar object in the inner Solar System. What is it? How did it get here? Is it aliens?

Discovered on October 19, 2017 by the Pan-STARRS1 Near-Earth Object survey, ’Oumuamua challenged astronomers’ assumptions about how small bodies from another star system would look.

It moved too fast to be an asteroid (in fact it was accelerating), it left no trail of debris—so couldn’t be an icy comet—and it also varied in brightness. 

Is it a fragment of a planet? A space-iceberg? An alien spaceship?

Since the object is already out of range of existing telescopes there’s only one way to find out. A newly published paper about Project Lyra outlines a mission to send a probe to see if ’Oumuamua is as extraordinary as it appears.

“Theories to explain the nature of 1I/’Oumuamua have included a fractal dust aggregate, a hydrogen iceberg, a nitrogen iceberg, an alien solar sail, fragments of a tidally disrupted planet, and so on,” reads the paper. “All explanations have one feature in common—they are extraordinary.”

In short, we must take a closer look.

The paper recommends a mission that launches in February 2028, spends four years getting gravity assists from Earth (twice), Venus and Jupiter before finally reaching ’Oumuamua in 2050-2054.

This isn’t the first attempt to plot a course for ’Oumuamua, though most of the other attempts have resorted to using an Oberth manoeuvre around the Sun. That tactic sees a spacecraft fall into a gravitational well and, as it’s falling, use its engines to add more acceleration. Its disadvantage is that a massive shield would be required to protect a probe against the Sun.

Instead, Project Lyra employs an Oberth manoeuvre around Jupiter. “The mission would much more resemble existing interplanetary missions,” reads the paper. The drawback is that launch opportunities are very limited.

The other option, of course, is to wait until another object like ’Oumuamua comes along. After all, there could be seven passing through our Solar System each year. It could even be that most comets come from other star systems.

It would not be wise to wait, according to the paper, because the second interstellar object ever found—2I/Borisov in 2019—resembles minor bodies already found in the Solar System. “This makes ’Oumuamua even more of an oddity and it is unclear what the likelihood of encountering a similar object again is,” reads the paper.

“The possible scientific return from such a venture make this an unmissable opportunity.”

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.