Timeline for How do you detect a rock in interstellar space?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 16, 2017 at 21:19 | comment | added | Willk | You could have it to detect rocks so you don't get hit, which is what I assumed your interest was. Or maybe because you might want to go visit bodies you discover in the interstellar void. Possibly retrieve small ones for study. The cool thing about your mass overtaking the ship is that (as I learned by doing here!) there is a continuum of solutions for a given gravitational signal, from something tiny and close approaching very slowly to something incredibly massive and very far away, but approaching really fast. | |
| Oct 16, 2017 at 18:09 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | @Will I now get the part where the 1000 kg mass was the detector. I should have realized that part from the math. It might work. The ship is no longer under acceleration, just coasting. The engines are shut off. If the detector were at the back of the ship (the rock comes from behind) it just night detect the difference in gravitational pull from a rock coming from behind. The instrument would have to be very sensitive. It could even give a sense of the closing speed. Interesting. Now I need a reason for the detector to be there in the first place. Maybe for research in the engines. | |
| Oct 16, 2017 at 17:47 | comment | added | Cem Kalyoncu | You could have a two part system. If passive detector finds anything interesting, active one will fire to check. | |
| Oct 15, 2017 at 14:40 | comment | added | Willk | I envisioned a 1000 kg dedicated homogenous mass used as the detector. Perhaps an ingot of osmium. 1000 kg is just the detector. More mass = easier to detect rocks. I think it would be harder to detect inflections on an inhomogeneous mass (like a ship) because its internal gravity would be shifting as things moved. I think once you are flying spaceships and detecting yoctonewtons, one distance is not intrinsically more implausible than another. | |
| Oct 15, 2017 at 13:50 | comment | added | Justin Thyme | Thank you sincerely for doing the math, It is quite illustrative. You have assumed the mass of the ship to be 1000 kg. My ship is much more massive than this, so the numbers would be much higher. The difficulty is that R^2 thing, It's okay when the rock gets close, and I have the rock coming from behind, so the relative velocities between the rock and the ship are not that great. So maybe... a gravimeter used for another purpose that happened to have a data record... | |
| Oct 15, 2017 at 2:13 | history | answered | Willk | CC BY-SA 3.0 |