Mission to 3I/ATLAS: Can We Intercept the Next Interstellar Object?

Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomi podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.

Okay, okay, stop me if you've heard this one before. A mysterious object from a totally a different star system just waltzes into our solar system. It's weird, it's moving impossibly fast, and it's basically carrying secrets from some alien world.

And then just as we figure.

Out what it is, poof, it's gone.

It's gone. It's already on its way out.

It really does feel like a recurring theme, doesn't it. It's the cosmic equivalent of meeting someone fascinating in an airport, having a great conversation, and then their flight gets called.

It's the ultimate at cosmic Teas we're sitting here, it is February sixteenth, twenty twenty six, and the entire astronomy world is buzzing about this thing.

Three I at Lass.

Yeah, the third one.

This is it the third interstellar object humanity has ever detected. First we had Umumua back in what twenty seventeen, that weird tumbling cigar.

Shaped thing caused so much debate.

Then Boresov came along a couple of years later, and it looked a little more familiar, bit more like a normal commet a bit. Yeah, and now at LUs but the headline feels exactly the same.

Hello, goodbye, nice knowing you.

It's just so frustrating. I mean, the geometry of these encounters is it's just unforgiving. By the time our telescopes are powerful enough to spot them, they are usually already screaming past the sun and heading for the exit door. Right, the universe is like throwing these incredible gifts at us, but it's throwing them really, really hard, exactly.

And the mood today, you can feel it online. It feels a bit somber, right, like we missed the bus again. I was just looking at the trajectory maps this morning, arning you know, tracking it on the NASA dashboard, and three Iadolass is moving at something like sixty kilometers per second. Sixty yeah, that's not just fast, that is I mean that is, don't even bother trying to chase me fast.

Well, under normal circumstances. Yes, yes, that's exactly what the physics would tell you. Sixty kilometers per second is it's blisteringly fast.

Put that in perspective for us.

Okay, So a high velocity rifle bullet travels at about one kilometer per second, give or take. So this rock is moving sixty times faster than a speeding bullet. It's completely unbound from the Sun's gravity, which means it isn't

But I hear a butt in your voice.

But and this is why today is actually a very very exciting day. The entire narrative has just shifted in the last few hours, shifted.

How the thing is leaving. It's got to be halfway to Jupiter's orbit by now, isn't it.

It is leaving and you're right. We absolutely can't catch it with a normal chase, A direct shot is impossible. But a new proposal just dropped today that suggests we actually can catch it.

Your kid is.

It's just that the method is well, it's completely unhinged.

Unhinged. I like unhinged. Unhinged usually means interesting.

Oh, it's audacious, it's beautiful. The proposal comes from a team including Adam Hibberd who's with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. They've crunched the numbers and they are saying, we can run this object down, but we don't do it by flying towards it.

Okay, I'm listening. Where do we fly them?

We catch it by flying directly into the sun.

I'm sorry, what come again?

Yep?

We want to catch a freezing cold rock that's heading out into the blackness of deep space. And step one of the plan is fly into the giant ball of fire.

Step one is fly into the fire. It's a technique called a solar O birth maneuver. And if this paper is that's right, it is the only way humanity is going to get a close up look at an alien object in our lifetimes.

Okay, we have to unpack this immediately, because that sounds like suicide, not science. But hold on, before we even get to the whole flying into the Sun part, we need to set the stage properly. What exactly is three eye out lists? Why are we so desperate to catch this thing that we're seriously considering roasting a multi billion dollar spacecraft.

Well, you have to think about what these objects really represent. Three eyelis isn't just a rock or you know, a dirty snowball. It's debris. It's leftover building material from the formation of a completely different solar system.

It's literally a message in a bottle.

Precisely, it's a physical package containing the chemical history of an exoplanet system. We spend billions and billions of dollars building these incredible telescopes like web to just stare at the atmospheres of planets light years away, trying to guess what they're made of from these tiny squiggles in a light spectrum.

Right, it's all remote analysis.

The universe has literally mailed a piece of one to our front door. If we can actually sample it, touch it, put it in a mass spectrometer and analyze its isotopes. Yeah, my god, it would be the scientific gold mine of the century.

It would tell us if our own Solar system is unique or if we're just common?

Are we common or are we a fluke. That's one of the biggest questions there is, right, It's.

The difference between looking at a picture of a cake and actually getting to eat a slice.

But here's the.

Problem, and this is what everyone is lamenting today. We can't eat the slice because the slice is moving at sixty kilometers per second away from us.

And that speed is the whole key to the problem. To put that sixty number in perspective again, the fastest spacecraft we've ever launched out of the Solar System is Voyager one, and it's.

Been going for what almost fifty years now.

Almost fifty years, and it's moving it about seventeen kilometers per second seventeen and that took decades of gravity assists to build up. Three ied lass is moving more than three almost four times faster than our fastest dever probe. We just can't catch it conventionally.

So why can't we just I mean, this is the obvious question, right, why can't we just launch a bigger rocket? We have these huge new rockets, the sls. We've got starship. Can't we just strap a probe to one of those and just floor it.

That's the direct mission approach. Yeah, it's a totally logical question and the first thing every mission designer looks at. But the math it just falls apart almost immediately. The issue isn't just the sheer speed, it's the timing. It's a combination problem. Three i Atlis was detected far too late in the game. It had already crossed inside Jupiter's orbit and swung around the Sun before we even knew it was there.

It totally snuck up on us, it really did.

And because it was detected so late, the optimal launch window, you know, that perfect time when Earth was in just the right spot in its orbit to simply shoot a rocket to intercept it, that window had already slammed shut. It was gone before we even knew it existed.

It's like trying to merge onto a highway. If you see a car coming from way down on the on ramp, you can time it, you speed up, you merge in.

Smoothly, perfect analogy, But if that car.

Is already blown past you while you're at a dead stop, you can't just accelerate from zero to one hundred miles an hour instantly to catch up.

The physics doesn't work.

You're standing on the train platform and the bullet train has already screamed past the station. That's the situation we're in.

Okay, But what if we were already in space. I know the European Space Agency has this mission planned, the Comet Interceptor. The idea is to have a probe just kind of waiting.

Right, loitering. Yeah. The concept is to park a spacecraft at a stable point in space the suner till two point and just wait for a suitable long period commet or ideally an interstellar object to show up.

So even if we had one of those waiting right now, it wouldn't work.

It would matter. The angle is all wrong and the speed is just too high. The sheer change in velocity required we call delta V and orbital mechanics is just monumentally beyond the capability of any chemical rockets we have sitting on a or even waiting in space.

So delta V is basically a measure of how much oomph you need.

It's the currency of space travel. Every maneuver costs a certain amount of delta V. Getting from Earth orbit to the Moon causes a certain amount. Getting to Mars costs more. Trying to catch three i ellas from a standing start costs an astronomical amount. If you tried to pack enough fuel to do it, you'd need a rocket the size of a skyscraper just to get a tiny coffee cup sized pro moving fast enough. And we can't build that.

So the direct approach is dead on arrival. Conventional wisdom says we wave goodbye, write some sad poetry, and wait for the next one in what another couple of years.

That was the conventional wisdom until this morning.

Okay, so enter the visionaries. Who are these people proposing the dive into the Sun plan? This sounds like a pretty Maverick idea, it is.

But they're not Mavericks in a a reckless sense. It's a fascinating team. You have Adam Hibberd, who is a just a brilliant orbital mechanic from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies or ifour okay, then you have t Mar Marshal U Banks from Space Initiatives, Inc. And Andreas Hine at the University of Luxembourg. These aren't just random enthusiasts. These are the folks who specialize in impossible navigation. They live for these kinds of problems.

They like the hard problem.

They love them. And Hibberd in particular is the main architect behind a really unique piece of software called os.

OITS what's that It stands.

For Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software. It sounds dry, I know, but you should think of it as a kind of GPS for the impossible hasso. Most mission planning software is designed to look for the most efficient direct routes, you know, a home and transfer from Earth to Mars. It's about saving fuel on established paths. Always. Hays is different. It's designed to look for cosmic bank shots. It looks for gravitational pinball.

So it's not looking for the straightest line. It's looking for loopholes.

It's looking for leverage points in the Solar System. And this isn't its first rodeo. It was the same software used to design Project Lyra, which was the big theoretic mission concept to go back and chase down umua oh.

I remember that that also seemed impossible at the time.

It did, and a direct mission was but always found these wild looping trajectories using Venus and Jupiter and Earth to eventually build up enough speed. So this software has a pedigree in solving these exact kinds of impossible navigation redeals.

Okay, so these guys fed all the data on three I clus its speed, its direction into this super smart software and just ask it a simple question, a very simple question.

Is there any way, anyway at all using any combination of planets and burns to catch this thing with current technology?

And the computer didn't just crash.

The computer came back with a resounding yes. But the path it plotted it's just wild. It's elegant and terrifying all at.

Once, which brings us back to the Solar.

O birth maneuver, the solar obirth.

Okay, lay it on me. I think I understand a basic gravity assist. That's where you fly by a planet like Jupiter and you kind of steal a little bit of its orbital momentum to speed yourself up. Right, Voyager did that a bunch of.

Times, exactly right. A standard gravity assist is like you're on a skateboard and you grab onto the back of a moving bus for a second. The bus barely notices, but you get a huge boost. But the overt effect is different. It's more profound. It relies on a quirk of orbiter mechanics. That feels it almost feels like a cheat code for the.

Universe, a cheat code. I'm listening. I like cheat codes.

The basic principle is this. A rocket engine is more efficient. It gives you a bigger booth than kinetic energy when the rocket is already moving very fast.

Wait, hang on, why that seems backwards. A rocket provides a certain amount of for ust a certain push. Why doesn't matter how fast I'm already going when I fire it?

It's all about kinetic energy. The formula for kinetic energy is one half mass times velosoity squared. The key is that squared part. Okay, So because of that squared relationship, if you add a fixed amount of velocity, Let's say you fire your engine and add one kilometer per second to your speed, the amount of energy you gain from that burn is massively larger if you're already going, say fifty kilometers per second, than if you're only going five.

Okay, I think I'm starting to get it.

So you want to save your biggest engine burn for the moment you are moving at your absolute maximum speed.

Precisely that is the key to the whole thing. So this question is obvious. Where in our Solar system does an object move the fastest when.

It's falling towards something really really heavy?

The Sun? The Sun is the biggest deepest gravity while we have by a long long shot. If you just drop a space graft and let it fall towards the Sun, gravity pulls it in, accelerating it faster and faster.

And faster, like rolling down the universe's biggest hill.

Exactly by the time it gets really close to the surface, or well, the photosphere, it is just screaming. It's moving faster than any man made object has ever moved in history.

So you let the Sun do all the hard work of acceleration for you.

You let gravity do the heavy lifting. You die. You fall all the way down into the deepest part of the well, and right at the very bottom of that dive, the point called perihelium, at closest point to the Sun, you are moving at these incredible mind bending speeds, and that that is when you fire your engine.

You hit the gas at the very bottom of the hill.

That's it. It's like being on a swing set. If you try to pump your legs at the very top of the arc, when you're almost motionless, it doesn't do much right.

You just kind of wiggle.

But if you give a huge kick right at the very bottom of the swing, when you're moving fastest, you go flying so much higher on the other side. This is the ultimate cosmic swing set. You dive at the Sun and at that single precise moment of closest approach, you burn everything. You have. The combination of the Sun's intense gravity and that perfectly timed rocket burn flings you out of the Solar System like a stone from a god's slingshot.

That is terrifyingly brilliant. So we're not really chasing three iolase at all. We're using the Sun to catapult ourselves onto a trajectory that will evente intercept it way out in deep space.

Yes, we're setting in ambush. The math in this new paper suggests that this maneuver can generate the kinds of exit speeds we need well over sixty, maybe seventy even eighty kilometers per second to actually run down an interstellar object that had a massive headstart.

But there's a catch, right, there's always a catch. This sounds too perfect. You can't just launch this mission tomorrow.

No, absolutely not. And this is where the beautiful, frustrating reality of celestial mechanics comes back in. It's a game of alignment. You need the planets to be in exactly the right places literally, for this to work. We need Earth, Jupiter, and the Sun to be in very specific positions relative to three iiizes escape path.

Okay, wait, why Jupiter? You lost me there? I thought this was all about the Sun.

It is, but we can't just fly from Earth to the Sun directly. It's actually, and this sounds crazy, it's really hard to hit the Sun.

It's the biggest thing around. How can it be hard to hit.

Because the Earth isn't stationary, We're moving sideways at about thirty kilometers per second in our orbit. To fall into the Sun, you first have to get rid of all that sideways momentum. It takes a huge amount of breaking fuel. So the clever plan is this launch from Earth and first fly out to Jupiter.

So you go outwards to go inwards. That makes no sense.

It's the bank shot. We use Jupiter's massive gravity not to speed up, but to slam on the brakes. We do a gravity assistant reverse. It kills our orbital speed, turns the spacecraft around and drops it into a dead dive straight at the Sun.

Wow.

So the full itinerary is launch from Earth, fly out to Jupiter for a few years, use Jupiter to U turn and dive into the Sun, do the crazy O birth run, and then shoot out into the void to chase Atla's a bank.

Shot off the King of Planets into the heart of the star to catch a ghost.

So according to Hibberd and his team, when does this magical cosmic window open? When are all the pieces in.

The right place?

Twenty thirty five?

Twenty thirty five, Okay, so that's nine years.

From now, nine years, which in the world of designing and building major flagship space missions is It's actually a very comfortable timeline. It's not a frantic scramble. It's doable. We could do this.

Well, let's talk about the tech for a minute, because usually when I hear people talk about chasing interstellar objects, they immediately start talking about, you know, laser arrays and light sales and antimatter engines, stuff that belongs in star trek.

Is that what this requires?

No, and that is probably the most important and exciting part of this new proposal. They are not asking for science fiction. They're not asking for directed energy propulsion or giant laser arrays on the dark side of the.

Moon, which is cool, but decades away.

Decades away at best. Yeah, this proposal is based on using solid rocket motors, chemical propulsion, the same fundamental stuff we've been using to launch satellite since the nineteen sixties.

You're kidding me, Just standard rockets. How can that possibly be powerful enough?

Well specialized? Of course, you need a kickstage that can survive the heat. But the physics of the solar overirth maneuver are so powerful that they compensate for the relative weakness of our chemical fuel. We don't need a sci fi engine because we are using the Sun itself as our primary engine. The physics gives us the leverage our chemistry lacks.

That makes it feel incredibly real. This isn't some maybe in one hundred years academic paper. This is a we could start bending metal for this tomorrow kind of paper.

It is the technological readiness level or TRL for all the key components is very high. We know how to build heat shields. We did it with the Parker solar probe, which is practically touching the Sun's atmosphere right now, and surviving.

Parker is a huge success.

We absolutely know how to do Jupiter flybys, who've been doing them since the pioneer missions in the seventies. And we definitely know how to make reliable solid rocket motors. The pieces are all on the board, we just need to assemble them in this new audacious way.

Okay, so we have the target three IAD lists, we have the mind bending method, the solar o birth, we have the technology. It's basically off the shelf. But now we have to talk about the elephant in the room, or maybe the tortoise in the room.

The duration.

The duration, because I saw the number in the abstract of the paper and I had to read it twice to make sure it wasn't a typo.

How long does it actually take for this probe after its twenty thirty five launch in Solar Dive to catch up to three A.

It lists the baseline simulation suggests a flight time of approximately fifty.

Years five zero fifty.

Yes, that's essential, So.

Let me get this straight. We launch in twenty thirty five, the probe performs its dive, gets flung out into space, and it finally catches the object in twenty eighty five.

That's the timeline.

Yes, I mean most of the people working on the mission, the engineers, the scientists who build it, they won't be alive when it arrives. That is very likely true.

Yes, wow, that is a hard sell, isn't it.

Hey, Congress, can you give us a few billion dollars for a mission.

That will give us some really cool photos for our grandkids in the year twenty eighty five.

It's a hard sell if you look at it through the lens of you know, typical four year election cycles or quarterly corporate reports. But this is where we have to fundamentally shift our thinking. This isn't a normal mission. We have to move to the realm of what some people call cathedral projects.

Cathedral projects explain that.

Think about the architects and the stonemasons who laid the cornerstones of the great cathedrals in medieval Europe. They knew with absolute one hundred percent certainty that they would not live to see the spire completed. Their children might not their grandchildren might not even see it finished, but they started anyway.

They were building it for the future, for something bigger than themselves.

They were building it for the future. This mission is a scientific cathedral. It's a legacy project.

That is a beautiful way to put it. But practically speaking, can we even maintain a mission for fifty years? I mean equipment, brakes, radioactive power sources, decay, signals degrade over those insane distances.

We have precedent, and it's an amazing one. Voyager one and Voyager two launched in nineteen seventy seven. They're still talking to us today nearly fifty years later.

That's incredible.

And that was with nineteen seventies technology. We're talking eight track tape recorders for data storage and less computing power than your watch. Imagine what a probe built with robust twenty thirties technology could do. It could be designed from the ground up for longevity. It could hiernate for decades, wake itself up periodically for check ins, and use advanced AI for self repair. It's an engineering challenge, but it's not an unsolvable one.

So it's a time capsule.

We launched the absolute best technology of twenty thirty five put it to sleep, and it arrives in the twenty eighties as this sort of retrofuturistic marvel.

And just think about the arrival in twenty eighty five, the scientists receiving that first signal, that first grainy, black and white image of an alien rock. They might be the grandchildren of the scientists who wave goodbye to it at the launch pad. There's a human continuity there that is just quite beautiful to think about.

It totally changes the definition of success for a project. Success isn't I got the data. Success is I made sure the data will exist for someone else to get.

Exactly, And you have to consider the alternative. If we say fifty years is too long, what's our other optioning nothing, we get zero data. Three IAT disappears into the dark forever and we never ever know what it was made of. The secrets it carries are lost.

So the choice isn't really wait fifty years or get the data now. The choice is wait fifty years or wait forever.

That's the choice. And let's just quickly compare to the other big dream actually flying to another star like Alpha Centauri, right, the Holy Grail, even with the wildest, most optimistic propulsion concepts, fusion rockets, laser sales, you name it. A trip to Alpha Centauri is going to take decades, maybe a century. And that's for technology we don't even have a blueprint for yet. Sure, this mission gives us the prize. We want actual physical matter from another star system without having

That is a really really powerful way to frame it. It's a shortcut, even if it takes a lifetime.

It is. And the scientific payoff, I mean, we really can't overstate it.

Okay, let's dig into that payoff. Let's say we do it. The world space agencies get together, they fund this thing. It launches in twenty thirty five. Fast forward, it's twenty eighty five. Probe wakes up. It's closing in on three I at lis. What are we looking for? What is the aha moment that makes the whole fifty year weight worth it?

We are looking for ground truth, right, now, our entire understanding of how planets form, how solar systems evolve, is based on a sample size of one us, our solar system. That's it. We assume that other systems formed in more or less the same way with the same ingredients, but we honestly don't know. It's a huge assumption.

We're just guessing based on what we see around us.

We're making very educated guesses, but there's still guesses. But what if the isotopic ratios of elements like oxygen or carbon are completely alien compared to what we find in our own commets. That would be revolutionary.

What would that tell us?

It would mean the cloud of gas and dust it formed from was different from our own about the star it came from. Maybe it was a different type of star or a different part of the galaxy. What if we find complex organic molecules, you know, the building blocks of life, that are different from the amino acids we find on meteorites here.

It could tell us if the basic ingredients for life are common throughout the galaxy.

Exactly, or it could tell us the opposite. It could tell us that our solar system is weirdly special, that we have a unique chemical cocktail that made life here possible. Either answer fundamentally changes our understanding of our place in the universe.

And we can figure this out with instruments on.

The pro Oh yeah, we can do this with spectrometers, with cameras, with dust analyzers. A key instrument would be a mass spectrometer, which basically weighs molecules and tells you exactly what they're made of. We could literally taste the alien dust.

When you put it like.

That, it really makes the fifty year weight seem almost trivial. When you're talking about answering the question are we alone or at least is our home unique? Fifty years is nothing.

It's the kind of knowledge that rewrites every textbook on Earth. And there's another angle here too, one that Hibberd and his team touch on in their paper. It's the practice, practice for what practice for the future. If we as a species ever want to become truly interstellar, if we ever want to send probes to proximate centory and get data back, we need to learn how to do it. We need to learn how to build spacecraft that can

So even if in the worst case scenario the probe gets there and the camera breaks or something, the engineering challenge of just getting it there makes us better. We learn so much along the way.

Precisely, it pushes the boundaries of deep space navigation, long duration systems, autonomous operations, everything we would need for the next great leap.

I want to go back to the Solar O birth maneuver for a second, because I'm still stuck on the sheer visual of this launching. In thirty five, we go on to Jupiter. You turn, we dive at the Sun. How close to the Sun are we really talking here? Are we talking like skimming the surface?

It gets pretty close. To get the maximum O birth effect the biggest kick. You want to get as deep into that gravity well as you can possibly survive the paper models of fu turejectories, but we're talking about getting within a few solar radii a.

Few times the Sun's own radius.

That's hot.

It is incredibly, unbelievably intense. The heat shield requirements are significant. You are essentially flying through the outer edges of a nuclear furnace. The radiation environment is brutal, but again, we've done this. The Parker Solar Probe is designed to get even closer than this mission would likely need to. We have the materials, We have these carbon carbon combas ceramic shields. We know how to survive the heat. The engineering exists.

It's just so counterintuitive to go to the coldest, darkest place in the void, you first have to go to the hottest, brightest place in our solar system.

Nature loves a paradox. Yeah, and the physics doesn't care about our intuition. It only cares about energy, and the most accessible gravitational energy in town is at the Sun.

It's fascinating that this proposal is coming out right now in twenty twenty six.

Do you think there's a new sense of.

Urgency because of how many of these objects were suddenly finding Oh?

I think so absolutely. When Omulua passed through in twenty seventeen, it was a complete shock. We were called totally flat footed. With Boris off. A couple of years later we were a little bit more ready, but it was still fleeting. Now with three IAT lists, the pattern is established. These things are out there and they are passing through our cosmic neighborhood all the time.

We just weren't looking properly before. Our telescopes weren't good enough exactly.

We are now officially in the era of ISO astronomy interstellar object astronomy, but I think there's a growing feeling that just looking isn't enough anymore. We want to touch, And the collective frustration of watching three iatlests get away is the direct motivation for this kind of innovative out of the box thinking people like hibberd Or saying I'm tired of watching them get away.

It's the scientific hunter instinct. We want to catch the ghost.

And oiat's the software is the bloodhound that's finding the scent trail.

Let's play Devil's advocate for a moment. What goes wrong?

What are the biggest risks aside from you know, waiting fifty years and then realizing we forgot to take the lens cap off.

Well, the launch itself is the first hurdle, as always, we need a heavy lift vehicle to get this thing honest way to Jupiter with enough mass. But by twenty thirty five, looking at the trajectory of rockets like starship and others that shouldn't be the bottleneck.

Okay, so launch is probably fine.

The real risk, the nail biting part, is the series of maneuvers, the Jupiter gravity assist and especially the Solar dive. These are games of incredibly high precision. If you miss your angle at Jupiter by a tiny fraction of a degree, you miss the Sun by thousands of miles. If you miss your angle at the Sun or you're burned, timing is off by a second, you either burn up or you miss the target by millions and millions of miles fifty years down on the line.

You're essentially threading a needle while riding a roller coaster in the dark.

And you have to do it all autonomously. You can't joystick this from Earth. The light travel time is way too long. The computer on board has to have the perfect clock, has to execute the burn perfectly at the moment of perihelion. It has to be smart and independent.

But again, this is an engineering problem.

It's not magic. It's just a very very hard engineering problem.

It is a solvable engineering problem.

So we have this incredible proposal on the table, A twenty thirty five launch, A fifty year cruise, a dive into the Sun and a rendezvous in the deep dark with a piece of another solar system.

What needs to happen now to make this real? This is just a paper right right now.

It's a paper that's been accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. It's a proof of concept. To make it real, a major space agency NASA, yes, maybe a private consortium or ideally a collaboration of all of them, needs to pick it up. They need to fund what's called a phase A study. And that is that's why they say, okay, orbital mechanics math looks good. Now let's get a team of engineers to actually design the hardware. What does the heat shield look like? What kind of

And do you think they will?

Is there an appetite for this kind of long term thinking?

That is the big question. Space agencies are by their nature quite risk averse. They like missions that have a high probability of success and finish within a decade. They like, for political reasons, to have some instant gratification. A fifty year mission is a very hard sell. But but the scientific community is allowed on this one. The desire to study in ISO up close is overwhelming. It's at the top of the wish list for a lot of planetary scientists.

Maybe a global coalition. This feels like something the whole world should go in on. It's not really an American mission or European mission, human mission.

It absolutely should be three iads. Loss doesn't care about national borders. It's a visitor to planet Earth, not to a specific country.

You know, thinking about that fifty year timeline again, it reminds me of planting a tree. You don't plant an oak tree for yourself. You know you'll never sit in its full shade. You plant it for the shade it will give your kids, your grandkids. This mission is a scientific oak tree.

That is the perfect analogy. And in a world that is so relentlessly focused on the now, on the next news cycle, the next tweet, the next quarterly report, there is something profoundly healthy about committing to a half century project. It forces us to think long term. It forces us to have faith that there will even be a civilization here in twenty eighty five, with scientists ready and waiting to receive the data.

It's an act of profound optimism it is.

Launching this probe is a statement. It's saying, we believe in the future.

I love that.

So here we are February sixteenth, twenty twenty six. Three I Atlas is speeding away from us at sixty kilometers a second. It thinks it has escaped, but somewhere in a lab, Adam Hibberd and his team were looking at a computer screen, nodding and saying, not so fast.

We're coming for you.

We're coming for you. It's just going to take us a while to get there.

Just a little while before we.

Wrap this up, I want to circle back to the object itself one last time. Three I eight t Lass. Do we know anything specific about it yet? I mean, from the very brief look we've had.

So far, we do. We know that it's volatile rich, which is a fancy way of saying it's acting like a comet. As it got close to the Sun, it started out gassing, forming a little coma and a tail. That's actually really good news for a chase mission. Why is that good news Because if it's actively outgassing, it's shedding, it's throwing off particles of dust and gas. That means we don't necessarily have to perform a risky landing or impact on it to sample it. We just have to

Years, a true galactic drifter.

Until it just happened to bump into us.

It really is a ghost, and this plan, the solar O birth maneuver, it honestly feels like the kind of thing that belongs in a future history book.

You know, in the year.

Twenty thirty five, humanity finally decided to reach out and touch the galaxy.

It would be a defining moment. It would be the moment we stopped being just passive observers of the universe through our telescopes and started becoming actor participants in the great galactic story.

Well, I, for one, am rooting for it.

I might be an old man when the data comes back, or I might not be here at all, but I would absolutely love to see that rocket clear the tower in twenty thirty five.

I'll be right there watching with you.

So to everyone listening, take a look at the night sky tonight. You won't be able to see three I at Lists with your naked eye. It's already too far and too dim now, But know that it's out there. It's racing away into the dark. But if these brilliant patient scientists have their way, we haven't seen the last of it. We're just giving it a head start, a fifty year head start challenge accepted. Absolutely, that's all the time we have for this. Look at the incredible chase

I really hope the answer is yes, me too.

Thanks for listening, everyone, Keep looking.

Up and keep thinking big.

We'll catch on the next one, said f.