We Caught Our First Interstellar Visitor — And Couldn't Even Get Close #Shorts

[00:00:00]By the time we noticed, it was already leaving, and we had no way to follow.

[00:00:05]Oumuamua was detected on October 19th, 2017.

[00:00:10]It had already passed its closest point to the Sun six weeks earlier. We caught it on the way out.

[00:00:17]It was moving fast, 26 km/s relative to our Sun. No spacecraft we had could match that. No launch could be prepared in weeks.

[00:00:28]A group of researchers proposed a chase mission. It was called Project Lyra.

[00:00:33]>> [music] >> The plan required launching a probe toward Jupiter, using the planet's gravity as a slingshot, then burning fuel for years. Even then, it would take decades to catch up. The project was never funded.

[00:00:48]By 2019, Oumuamua was beyond Jupiter. By 2020, it was beyond Saturn. By the time we built the will, the window [music] was gone.

[00:00:58]We had encountered the most unusual object ever recorded in our sky, and we had not been ready. No probe, no image up close, no sample. Just weeks of distant data from telescopes that were never designed for this.

[00:01:13]Whatever Oumuamua was, the answer left with it. It is gone. It is not coming back.

[00:01:20]And the worst part is, we may have only one chance like that in a lifetime. Or, so we thought. We were wrong.