Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet

[Lmoy]

http://xkcd.com/1244/

Okay, that made me laugh.

Still, that's why I'm asking. What could the general plan be to send a probe to Planet 9?

 

[Urwumpe]

Okay, that made me laugh.

Still, that's why I'm asking. What could the general plan be to send a probe to Planet 9?

Depends on how much discovered it is. Right now, it still possibly does not exist.

If we get more studies with more and different KBOs that confirm the hypothesis, but we have still no chance to discover it by telescopes, we could send a space telescope closer to the region. For example by a highly elliptic (comet-like) orbit, which would allow doing an extended mission in a different region of the solar system with some minor navigation.

If we discovered it, it would just depend on the opportunity - which planets are available for a swing-by, what is the encounter velocity then, could we reduce eccentricity of the orbit by a Neptune flyby to reduce encounter velocity... etc.

As long as we have no good mass estimate of it, only a flyby would work. Even small errors in planet mass estimates would make a useful orbit-insertion hard to impossible. If the errors are small enough, a careful approach would work.

 

[perseus]

Meanwhile photograph the planet, its position even send a probe is possible in Orbiter

Planet IX (Empanda)

 

[Notebook]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35996813

Make things a lot simpler if they gave Pluto the job back...

Planet Nine's profile fleshed out

 

[Andy44]

Yeah, Pluto has become the Space Shuttle Enterprise of planets: initially given full status and then having it yanked out from under it, with future schoolkids to be taught it was never a planet to begin with.

 

[Urwumpe]

One more evidence that suggests, that not a ninth planet is needed for explaining the data, but that the clustering of ETNOs could be caused by plain observation bias.

No Evidence for Orbital Clustering in the Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects

The apparent clustering in longitude of perihelion $\varpi$ and ascending node $Ω$ of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) has been attributed to the gravitational effects of an unseen 5-10 Earth-mass planet in the outer solar system. To investigate how selection bias may contribute to this...

arxiv.org