Two suspected interstellar objects have visited the Solar System.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Scientists finally have the technological means to detect interstellar objects. Scientists have identified two of them interstellar object in recent years, ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov.
Borisov behaved like an ordinary comet after entering the solar system. However, ‘Oumuamua is a completely different object. Oumuamua never developed a comet tail, as many scientists think.
Scientists have no doubt that there are many more interstellar objects out there. Now, scientists are hatching a plan to intercept the interstellar object.
Reported by sciencealertOn Monday (11/14/2022), a draft paper from a team of American scientists brought us one step closer to launching such a mission.
Scientists are now building instruments that may be able to detect interstellar objects. That instrument is the Vera C Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). LSST will be able to detect 1 to 10 interstellar objects the same size as ‘Oumuamua each year. This tool will likely find many candidates for interstellar objects.
According to the paper, the best place to place the instrument is most likely the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point. Positioning at this point has several advantages.
For one thing, it took very little fuel to stay at the station. This is because the detection of interstellar objects can require years of archival mode.
Also, another proposed instrument, namely NASA’s Time-domain Spectroscopic Observatory (TSO), is a 1.5m telescope designed to be located at the L2 Lagrange point, alongside better-known telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). TSO has the ability to capture images in minutes.
The instrument can also be equipped with another telescope, the Near Earth Object Survey. When paired with TSO, these two fast-acting telescopes should be able to capture images of incoming interstellar objects Solar system the inside.
