A team of researchers from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences has modelled a scenario for a space mission to study the planet Sedna that could be sent into space in 2029-2037.
So suddenly, despite all the problems of lack of funding and other obstacles of our sluggish economy. Scientists are understandable: they have their own vision of the urgent matters at hand and a different time frame. If we will not fly to Sedna, which rotates behind Neptune, in 2029, we will have to wait for an opportunity for 10 thousand (!) years. What is Sedna anyway?
Sedna is a dwarf planet in the Solar System, located in the so-called region between the Kuiper Belt (a region located between 30 and 55 astronomical units (a.u.) from the Sun) and the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud (a hypothetical spherical region of the Solar System, which is thought to be between 1-2 thousand and 50-100 thousand a.u. from the Sun).
The diameter of Sedna is estimated to be about 1000 km (this is about half that of Pluto). A peculiarity of Sedna is its exceptionally elongated orbit, a full rotation of which takes more than 10 thousand years. At aphelion, the farthest point of its orbit from the Sun, Sedna moves away from the Sun at a distance of about 1000 AU, while at perihelion, it approaches at 76 AU.
The article in Advances in Space Research was authored by researchers Vladislav Zubko and Alexander Sukhanov of the Cosmic Dynamics and Mathematical Information Processing Department.
- Why was Sedna of particular interest to you? - I ask Vladislav Zubko.
- In recent years, hundreds of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune (transneptunian objects, or TNO) have been discovered and Sedna is one of them. However, Sedna stands out among them. It is unique in that it is one of the few known objects orbiting the Sun, but it is almost always distant from our cosmos, in the most mysterious and unexplored regions of the solar system. To compare: Pluto, which was considered before 2006 to be the farthest planet from the Sun, but has now been "demoted" to dwarf planets, is between 29.7 and 49.3a.u. from the Sun. (that is from 4.4 to 7.4 billion km), while Sedna moves at a distance of several hundred astronomical units (i.e. hundreds of billions of km!) from the Sun, and only once in 10 thousand years approaches it "only" by 76 a.u. (about 11.4 billion km). It is logical to assume that such a celestial body could be very different from the objects in space that we are used to observing. The composition of Sedna, or its surface, may contain unchanged material, including organic material that existed near the Sun only in the early stages of the formation of its planetary system, but which is now preserved only in its most distant outskirts, where the influence of the Sun is very weak. This means that the study of Sedna could provide us with truly unique information about the matter that made up our solar system billions of years ago. And if we were to miss this unique opportunity to study the object up close, the next opportunity of this magnitude would be more than 10 000 years away.
Sedna is now approaching perihelion. It will pass its orbit nearer the Sun in 2075.
Of course, even though it is at perihelion, the distance to Sedna will be enormous. But it seems that it is the present mankind that has a rare opportunity to send a spacecraft to this body and wait for the result. After all, the flight to Sedna should, according to experts, take no more than 50 years (and according to one of the most optimistic options - less than 18 years), the authors of the article.
