If that asteroid has enough velocity to escape orbit, the lander would have to reach that velocity as well. Basically nullifies any gains of landing on it.

'Permanent moon base' - 'that word, I do not think it means what you think it means'.

No permanent habitation on or around the moon, very close to the same number of flights as apollo, with nearly the same cadence, for basically the same money.

(taking for the moment that the lunar lander solution would be something like BOs lander for BO money, as starship lander raises the unfortunate 'can do every single thing the rest of the program can do' issue)

We have no idea what we might put on the moon at $10000/kg (F9 cost for starship, times about ten for extra delta-v with depots). The current hardware is all designed to be two orders of magnitude more expensive.

(I am not saying spacex is the only solution, just that it's looking like several vendors might be qualified in the nearish future for launching largish payloads to LEO at $1K/kg.)

For an asteroid to be useful for interstellar travel it has to be moving really fast. Which means we have to catch up with it. And if we can catch up with it, we don't actually need it. There's no benefit.

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there's a lot of stars with planets. you want to find ONE PLANET.

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>Why is it so order in our own backyard?

this covers a patch of sky the size of your thumbnail held at arms length. 10,000 galaxies, each with tens of millions of stars... each of those stars with planets.

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The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is a deep-field image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing an estimated 10,000 galaxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

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this covers a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arms length

NASA’s Webb Delivers Deepest Infrared Image of Universe Yet
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/nasa-s-webb-delivers-deepest-infrared-image-of-universe-yet/

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far. Webb’s First Deep Field is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and it is teeming with thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared.

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Slowing an object down relative to ourselves for mining would be possible with alot of energy.

However the unstable nature of such objects make them a poor choice for habitation. Not to mention the massive solar radiation spikes you will get when passing too close to the sun.

Mining asteroids near a belt would be better as they aren't hurdling through the solar system.

Mining another planet Is the best option.

And most of the Exoplanets are actually found by observing the small doppler (color) shift of the parent star light as the planet tugs the star towards us then away from us, which is why most of the planets found so far are close to their parent stars (means we can find the color/doppler shift with shorter observation times). Since this object would be beyond the orbit of Neptune, its orbit period is longer, thus one would have to make very precise observations over baselines of a century or so to see the signal start to show up in solar observations. We might just be getting close to that threshold now though if someone wanted to try to compile the last century of data and try to correct for all the instrument bias and other sources from the rest of the known solar system. That would only give us the general orbit period and distance though.

An excellent novel on that topic is "Pushing ice" by Alastair Reynolds. But it's not on a natural asteroid... It's on a spaceship asteroid that is set to travel both n deep space and in deep time...

And send that multi-billion dollar probe (and passengers?) off on a multi-million year journey into .. space.

But not another star. Those things aren't going 'somewhere,' they're just 'going.'

And since we'd have to rocket the probe up to 'interstellar asteroid' velocity (committing it? a suicide run?) before the thing passed us by, the 'resources' available to the probe/astronauts on the thing would be a complete guess.

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To gently land on something, you have to match its speed.

A related theory was that this hypothetical body was larger than Neptune, potentially a brown dwarf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)

True, I was kinda hoping my question encapsulated local travel too.

Don’t some pass through the solar system? And never return. Particularly at certain speeds?

One way would be to send out two observatories in perpendicular directions then at a sufficient(?) distance, have them look back at the sun and look for unexpected perturbations. Then calculate.

It wouldn't be cheap though...

Realistically as someone else said you could attach an autonomous craft to land on the asteroid. Though I imagine this usage could extend to humans too, given the difficulty of space travel either-way,

This.

Exoplanet hunting is significantly easier because of this. We also know where to look because each star acts as a beacon indicating that there may be planets and the field of view required for detection is minimal. We don't really need to calculate where they may be, we just have to observe in one small spot of the sky for a bit of time and see if the brightness level changes.

Trying to detect another planet around our own sun we could potentially calculate for, but even trying to observe it may be incredibly difficult as it could be a very dark object that doesn't radiate much of anything and if it is passed neptune it is barely receiving any light from our sun. Add in that it technically could be anywhere within sky, more realistically within the 17 degrees all other planets of the sky are within, we still would have to look over huge swaths of the sky to try and find it. A most difficult task indeed.

took the biggest rocket we have to send the mass equivalent of a Honda Civic to fetch a sample. problem is, you have to CATCH UP first.

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https://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex

OSIRIS-REx traveled to near-Earth asteroid Bennu and is bringing a small sample back to Earth for study. The mission launched Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The spacecraft reached Bennu in 2018 and will return a sample to Earth in 2023.

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>could mine the asteroid for all of the materials needed for survival. This could allow say a small spacecraft to fully colonise the comet and fortify it for long distance travel.

not anytime soon.

Asteroids in the Solar System are in orbit around the Sun. The orbit may be wildly different from planets, and much more erratic, but it's still an orbit.

A better question is whether we could use asteroids for interplanetary travel. That's actually a possibility in the future, but it's beyond our present capabilities.

Terrifying thought to be shot out into the void of space for all of time in hopes of finding another planet to colonize.

2¢

At the very least I imagine we could land a probe on one or even tether to it as a means of getting the probe going very fast before it even starts to use it's fuel

I agree it's best to be skeptical here but folks are pinning this alleged planet nine at an apparent magnitude greater than 20/21 That's very faint, even by modern standards. While that's not out of reach in big telescopes, it's time intensive and you'd need to know bang on where to look.

That magnitude is near the limit of most of the ongoing all sky surveys, so it's not particularly surprising that it wouldn't yet show up that way were it to exist. In that respect at least I don't think it's fair to totally rule it out because we don't see it yet. That's way harder than it might initially might seem. Things as far away from the sun as this is proposed to be are going to be really difficult to detect via the ole' photon collection method regardless of size.

There’s a documentary about this on Curiosity Stream “Search for our Suns Lost Planet” it follows a couple leading researchers on the topic. I found it rather insightful :)

Idk if anyone else got a, “Sailor Moon” visual but I enjoyed it..

In order to see it we'd need to know exactly where to look. In order to know where to look we need to see it.

If the orbit is eccentric enough then when it's closest to the sun it will be much easier to spot. But that could be centuries from now.

With deep space radio telescopes I think we'd have a good chance of finding any missing planets, could use active radar to scan large sections of the sky.

That also could take centuries though.