" wrote in message
...
On Dec 4, 1:12 pm, Pat Flannery wrote:
Sounds like a great beginning for a 1950's Sci-Fi movie
plot:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28023860/
Seriously, if it is from another star system, this would be worth
getting a sample return mission to.
So we sent out a probe to do a flyby of it... and as the probe
approached, we first saw written on the surface of the comet those
words
of terror that could spell the doom of mankind: "Space Battleship
Yamato
is destroyed...all your anime are belong to us." :-D

On a more serious note, devoid of any anime nonsense, it seems to me
that the energy requirements to intercept an extrasolar comet on a
hyperbolic trajectory would be too great.
Too much fuel would be needed to even catch up to it.

=======================

And twice over! You joined an object in a hyperbolic
orbit and it's going *out*. So now you must kill your
hyperbolic velocity and develop an appropriate return
orbit, this is going to be a pretty wild mission.

Actually, re that object from another star, how do you
know that's what it is? I'd expect such an object at
first approximation, to be practically indistinguishable
from something local.

Unless, of course, it turned out to be a *made* object,
like a spacecraft or an aldrin cycler kind of thing.

Titeotwawki -- mha [sci.space.policy 2008 Dec 15]