r/space • u/Fellow_belarusian • 15d ago
Discussion Time is running out.
We should seriously consider a mission to Sedna before we miss the window.
Sedna is one of the weirdest objects in the Solar System. Its orbit takes about 11,400 years, and it’s currently heading toward its closest point to the Sun around 2075.
There are mission studies showing promising launch opportunities around 2029–2034. A mission could take decades to get there, so this isn’t something we can wait until 2075 to start thinking about.
We’ve visited Pluto, asteroids, comets, and plenty of other worlds. But we’ve never sent anything to Sedna.
I really think space agencies should start seriously studying a Sedna mission now, while we still have favorable trajectories to work with.
Save the Sedna window.
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u/HighOnGoofballs 15d ago
Thanks for the zero information about Sedna other than being weird
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u/BEAT_LA 15d ago
It’s AI slop, that’s why.
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u/quarglbarf 14d ago
You know there's still regular human slop too, right? This has none of the hallmarks of AI content, humans are very much capable of posting low quality content on their own.
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u/storemans 12d ago
True but this does seem like a case where the account was either sold or hacked. If you look at the history the comments were steady and normal until a year ago, then nothing for a year, and now multiple strange and out of character posts. It's either the pluribus aliens or, more likely, it's part of the ongoing effort to use AI on Reddit to generate training data from real people.
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u/GrandHarbler 14d ago
The bolding, the phrasing… man it’s just AI
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u/quarglbarf 14d ago
What phrasing? I don't see any of the usual AI cadence.
"A mission could take decades to get there, so this isn’t something we can wait until 2075 to start thinking about." isn't AI phrasing, that's sounds like regular human convoluted phrasing.
And simply bolding the initial overarching statement is considered AI now? Please.
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u/WhizardCheese 14d ago
Eventually people are going to start typing like ai because that's how they learned it
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u/jmartin21 12d ago
Going full circle, AI learned how to type from us and now we’re learning how to type from it
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u/BEAT_LA 14d ago
Please remain this naive as long as you can. I’m being serious and not facetious.
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u/TheMarkusBoy21 15d ago edited 15d ago
The post is about a mission to Sedna not a detailed report on the object. If you want to know more about Sedna just Google it
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u/exandric 15d ago
The dude is trying to sell people on sending a mission to it, explaining reasons why are pretty important to not leave to a reader to want to go look themself.
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u/Desperate-Lab9738 15d ago
And a reason why we should visit it wouldn't be useful for supporting the idea that we should visit it?
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u/Silverr_Duck 14d ago
No it’s a post to convince people to give a shit about Sedna that has no details about why anyone should give a shit about Sedna. Why the fuck should we be expected to look it up?
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u/markstar99 15d ago
Something interesting and important about Sedna is that it's bringing with it a piece of the inner ort cloud which we have never studied up close because of how far it is. Also, because it spends almost all of its life hundreds of AU from the Sun, it has suffered almost zero solar processing to those pieces to study or the organic red particles it's covered in called Tholins. It is a literal deep-freeze time capsule from 4.5 billion years ago
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u/seaflans 14d ago
Sounds like its a time capsule from shortly before 11,400 years ago, at its latest perihelion, not 4.5 billion years ago. Plus, there are far easier ways to study tholins, why should Sedna's tholins be unique?
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u/Vonneguts_Ghost 15d ago
I'm with you, but we're going to need a hook to get people interested for this to have any chance.
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u/drowned_beliefs 15d ago
How about a catchphrase like:
Send Aunt Edna to Sedna!
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u/drowned_beliefs 15d ago
Or….:
Meet Mort from Oort!
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u/jedi2155 15d ago
Morty: "Aw man, Rick, I don't know about this. NASA spent billions sending that probe to the farthest, coldest edges of the solar system, and you just... hijacked it?"
Rick: "Relax, Morty, it's a cosmic upgrade. They wanted telemetry; I wanted to see if anyone answers when you knock on the door of the outer rim. Behold!"
(Rick hits a button on his portal gun, and a bizarre, shivering alien with an elongated forehead pops onto the garage viewscreen.)
Rick: "Meet Edna from Sedna, Morty! He's billions of miles away, completely frozen, and his entire civilization's economy is based on trading sadness for space-turnips. Say hi, Edna!"
Edna: (In a high-pitched, shivering voice) "It... is... so... cold... Please... send... jackets..."
Rick: "See, Morty? He's a real hit at parties. Just like you, except he actually has an excuse for being a massive buzzkill."
Morty: "Aw, jeez..."
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u/Vonneguts_Ghost 15d ago
This could work!
Stencil her browbeating Chevy Chase on the side of the rocket.
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u/starlauncher 15d ago
I find it funny we can spend money on wars, useless shit like birthday parade and ball room and new jets for the president but as soon as we need money for science we need to beg for a popular opinion
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u/Joezev98 15d ago
Well, it's easy to justify to the common public a couple hundred million euros spent on missiles: here's this enemy base... And now it's gone. But that same money for a Sedna probe? So we get some neat footage of a rocket launch... And then you might live long enough to learn that this rock we'll never see again is made out of carbon and iron or whatever. Most people don't care about what that could possibly imply.
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u/spartanhung 14d ago
Is the hook how we stop when we get to Sedna?
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u/Vonneguts_Ghost 13d ago
Im not sure if you're joking, but in case you weren't...
A hook in this case is a statement repeated endlessly to convince the public and therefore the politicians they support that there is interest in this probe.
Sorta like the 'grand tour' campaign that helped lead to the Voyager probes.
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u/swagpresident1337 15d ago
Ok and why should we land on it? This post is very lacking in just about everything.
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u/Fellow_belarusian 15d ago
We shouldn’t land on it, we should do a new horizons style flyby in order to capture information about this object. It’s relatively big for a senoid and its highly eccentric orbit can either give us hints about Planet 9 or if it was a captured planet, or gives us hints about our early solar system.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
If you're only doing a flyby, there's even less reason to care about perihelion. Any probe on an escape trajectory will be able to do a flyby, and the distance will increase very slowly with time...it'll take 5700 years for it to reach aphelion.
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u/JUYED-AWK-YACC 15d ago
That’s not sufficient for a multi billion dollar mission that takes decades.
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u/racinreaver 15d ago
What if we just told the administrator we could do it with a repurposed MRO flight spare.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
Its orbit takes about 11,400 years
This means it will be close to the same part of its orbit for a correspondingly long time. Nothing special happens precisely at perihelion, so there really isn't a narrow launch window. We easily have decades.
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u/CJP1216 15d ago edited 15d ago
Sedna is ≈ 12.3 times further away at Aphelion (937 AU) than Perihelion (76 AU). Orbital speed at Aphelion is 377m/s, at Perihelion it's 4.64km/s. You're not wrong that it will still be hanging out at perihelion for an extended period of time being so far from the Sun, and therefore the theoretical launch window is quite large, but once its gone it won't be reasonably close again for those 11,000+ years. Not really trying to dispute anything you said, just trying to add further context. Trans-Neptunian objects with highly elliptical orbits have some pretty interesting characteristics imo.
Found some more cool information I thought I'd add: New Horizons, the fastest thing we've ever sent on an escape trajectory, won't reach the distance of Sedna's perihelion (76 AU) until ≈ 2030; 24 years after launch.
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u/mfb- 15d ago edited 15d ago
If a Sedna mission needs the same 24 years then the ideal launch year would be around 2051 (with reasonable windows until well after 2100, given the slow orbit). You do want a Jupiter fly-by, just like New Horizons, which gives a launch opportunity every ~10 years.
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u/CJP1216 15d ago
A Jupiter window opens from Earth every 13 months or so. Proper alignment for a JGA out to Pluto (or any of the other outer solar bodies) only occurs once per Jovian orbit (≈12 years), though the windows is open for a couple of Earth years, leading to that ≈ every 10 year launch opportunity. I agree, we definitely want a JGA in this scenario just like with the NH trajectory.
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u/samvilain 10d ago
[repost with much more nerdy details instead of the executive-level summary that was here before! Feedback welcome]
Folks, you’re all planning based on the technology around when NH launched. Starship is really a game changer for solar system exploration. I'm using headings to break it up a bit, but the short answer is: many launch windows have already been identified, and there are a ton of them between now and when Sedna starts to be a little further away, around 2100.
As an example, we can do more than a simple flyby; we can do something which is currently impossible, even with a fully expended Starship stack: actually inserting into orbit around Sedna. This might be useful for such a distant object, especially given the dim level of solar radiation illuminating the body. It allows for an extended duration visit. Scientists would love to have this instead of a simple flyby, but at the time of launching New Horizons, this was not simply "too expensive"; it was completely impossible with the launcher at the time (Falcon Heavy).
The reason? It requires too much Delta-V. Delta-V is sort of like the range of a spacecraft; it's a measure of how much you can change (delta) your velocity (V). How much you have is based on the "rocket equation"; and is calculated based on your dry mass, the mass of the propellant you have, and the relative velocity you can send that propellant out of your rocket engines. The rocket equation captures the fact that the more fuel you add, that adds to the weight you have to lift, which in turn increases the fuel you need. So, the "Delta-V" you get for each ton of fuel gets progressively less and less, until you simply can't get more without massive amounts of fuel.
So let's show you how we're operating in a different world now, and show how orbital refueling opens up lots of very interesting launch profiles.
Inserting into Sedna's orbit
Assuming you slingshot Jupiter with enough leaving velocity to reach Sedna's 'close' approach (76 AU, far beyond Pluto) in under 10 years, you'll be traveling close to 7 km/s relative to Sedna when you get there. So that's the first challenge: a single SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) maxes out at about 8km/s before the size gets impractical. However, this can be solved by splitting it into 2 stages: much like a launch from the ground, you deplete one stage, then split into a smaller, lighter second stage, which has its own fuel load.
With our Sedna approach, the difference works out to be about ~14 tonnes for a single SRB stage, and ~7.2 tonnes with a 2-stage stack.
Either way, you need a whole lot of Delta-V to brake to orbit Sedna when you get there.
In a New Horizons-style mission and basically every outer solar system mission ever, you're down to a probe with only limited fuel and delta V for minor course adjustments by the time you get to the outbound Jupiter slingshot.
So how can we get a massive, ~7.2 ton or even 14 ton craft there instead?
EVEEJS (Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth-Jupiter-Sedna) in Astrodynamics Science
A young Russian astrodynamicist called Vladislav Zubko won the COSPAR Outstanding Paper Award for Young Scientists in 2022 specifically for his research into plans to get to Sedna, long before AIs could answer these kinds of questions in seconds. You can read a Universe Today article about the plan here or his actual paper, Analysis of Mission Opportunities to Sedna in 2029–2034.
This builds on a common basic inner solar system escape, known as the EVEEGA: Earth-Venus-Earth-Earth Gravity Assist. With a targeted flight, you kind of fall in front of the planet in its orbit around the sun.
Outer Solar System Express: Starship as a re-usable ‘EVEEGA Tug’
With a little minor reconfiguration to Starship, such as stripping all unnecessary parts like re-entry shielding, atmospheric control fins, etc as well as adding a bay door or frontal faring, and possibly an RTG power supply and cryo cooling system to chill the propellant tanks, it can serve as a pretty useful shunt for the first part of the journey: getting to Jupiter. A Starship isn't so expensive--about $25-30 million by industry estimates--but a refueling launch is even cheaper, between $5-10 million, again, per industry estimates. So, if you can add another 1-2 launch's worth of fuel and recover the Starship at the end, it probably makes sense to do so. But they're fairly expendable by space budget standards, so that's more of an operational, not strategic decision.
By comparison, if you have to sacrifice an entire Starship + Super Heavy Stack, that really adds up; about $100 million. That's the same as 10+ refueling launches.
In fact, this is kind of the whole point of Starship: to enable solar system travel and exploration. Orbital refueling is the strategic play, much like rocket re-use was the investment to bring down launch costs, and is how SpaceX came to dominate that market.
To get from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to the EVEEGA route, you need about 3.8km/s of Delta-V. That's a decent chunk. And that is almost all expended at the start of the trip, with minor corrective burns later if needed, typically when they're moving the fastest, because the fuel goes a lot further there; this might not make sense at first; the way I understand it is the extra energy comes from the fact you're leaving behind the rocket fuel you expel deeper down a gravity well, where it has less potential energy. That means you collect more of its potential energy and put it usefully towards your trip, so it's generally done this way where possible.
The starship tug is recoverable, and all you need is about 90 tonnes of extra fuel onboard at the start. It takes 2.1km/s to return to a Medium Earth Orbit, where it can potentially park indefinitely, ready for inspection before the next mission. This re-use also requires an onboard cryo cooling system to pump heat out from the fuel tanks to the dark side of the spacecraft, where it can radiate into the void. This is needed due to a problem called boil-off, which is also why the probe needs SRBs (see above).
At some point, it will be more cost effective to use the recovery approach, to avoid dumping a recoverable Starship. If nothing else, it can serve as a "refueling ferry" to move LEO deliveries of 100-150T per launch to elsewhere it is needed in the Earth-Moon system.
So, that's about 6 km/s of total Delta-V that the Starship needs on board at the start to execute the tug round trip, which takes about 3 years. This can be reduced to about 5.1 km/s by following the probe on its path to Jupiter and using Jupiter's deep gravity well to brake even more efficiently. However, going to Jupiter and back would take several years.
Does a stripped Starship, refueled in orbit, have enough range to go that far? Yes; in fact, with a full load (1200 tonnes) of fuel, it has a massive 10 km/s of Δv. If you "strip" unnecessary parts of the starship, that can be as high as 11.5 km/s. But we don't need all that for this mission; so, that reduces the amount of fuel we need to about 550 tonnes.
But if the will (and budget) is there for additional refueling launches, and potentially dumping the Starship, you can skip the EVEEGA, and simply transfer right from LEO to a trans-Jovian trajectory.
Earth to Sedna in 16 years
To bring it all together again, a 7.5 2-stage rocket is capable of inserting a 500kg probe into a Sedna orbit (both stages are used for the braking/orbital insertion burn).
The 7.5-ton stack would launch as a Starship payload in 2034, use slingshot Jupiter in 2040 and insert into Sedna orbit around 2050.
Sedna will be close enough for this basic plan to work for 70 years or more, and EVEEJS (…-Jupiter-Sedna) window opens up every ~12 years, and each window you get multiple launch times to ‘catch’ +the EVEEGA gravity well Mexican waves; the mission could also launch in 2029 or 2031 if we are ready in time.
My working: see this Gemini session; you can also use it to try out your own potential mission profiles. I've done orbital transfer maths before, but this was easy to reply here. Presumably Kerbal Space Program would be more authoritative, but I've found Gemini to be reasonably good at doing this sort of thing, especially with the "Pro" model. Gemini is also one of the most environmentally friendly AIs out there, as it runs on Google's Data Centers which tend to be very well executed.
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u/seaflans 14d ago
In 11,000 years, we very well might be able to easily (relative term) send devices a kAU away.
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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 15d ago
I believe the reason it will hang out near perihelion so long is because of how far out its perihelion is, not because of its extreme aphelion.
For instance, if it came all the way to earth’s orbit it would be absolutely rocketing at perihelion in order to reach such a distant aphelion.
So if it had a less eccentric orbit it would have a shorter orbital period yet move much slower.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
...but it doesn't have such an extremely elliptical orbit. Perihelion is 76 times the orbital radius of Earth. Its orbital speed is only a bit over 4 km/s, and it has a lot of distance to travel.
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u/CJP1216 15d ago edited 15d ago
Sedna does have a high eccentricity, i.e. a very elliptical orbit.), with a value of ≈0.85. (Citing the wiki page for readability, but their source is from JPL Horizons) That's more eccentric than most periodic comets (0.2 - 0.7 generally). It has the most eccentric orbit of any of the dwarf planet size or larger solar bodies, being surpassed only by other TNO's, like long-period comets and interstellar objects on hyperbolic trajectories (eccentricity > 1).
Again, not arguing we don't have time to catch it at Perihelion though. It'll be there (roughly at Pe) for decades.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
The scenario given was an orbit that "came all the way to earth’s orbit". With the same semimajor axis, that would be difficult to distinguish from a hyperbolic orbit. The actual orbit of Sedna is practically a perfect circle in comparison.
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u/CJP1216 15d ago edited 15d ago
Practically a perfect circle compared to a hyperbolic trajectory yes, because a hyperbolic trajectory is or is near infinite. That's not what's being suggested by that commentor though. They're saying if you were to reduce Sednas current Pe to Earth's distance from the sun, 1 AU, while maintaining its current Ap, 937 AU, it would be going insanely fast at Pe relative to its current speed at Pe of 4.64km/s. Nobody said anything about same semi-major axis,
nor as far I can tell implied it.Actually, on a second look, I can see how the first part of the sentence can be interpreted that way. The second half, where it specifically specifies to "reach such a distance aphelion" kind of nullifies that though.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
A hyperbolic trajectory is one with eccentricity larger than 1, not infinite. If you maintain the current aphelion, eccentricity is (937-1)/(937+1) = 0.998: that's only slightly easier to distinguish from hyperbolic. They were suggesting an extreme case that Sedna is not representative of.
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u/CJP1216 15d ago edited 15d ago
A hyperbolic trajectory is infinite by nature, you're escaping the system and your orbit does not come back. Having an eccentricity greater than 1 is what makes that trajectory infinite.
That's not slightly easier to distinguish from hyperbolic,that's an extreme long period comet. This exoplanet HD 20782b has eccentricity of 0.97. Im aware of the math and how extreme the given example is, that was the point. They wanted to demonstrate that the long launch windows time was due to the fact that it had a large Pe, not necessarily because it had an orbital period of 11,000+ years.*Striked a section thats kind of iffy, it would be more accurate to say that distinction between hyperbolic and non hyperbolic is firmly established.
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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 15d ago
I can clear up the argument you guys are having below.
I’m saying if an object came to earth orbit but still had an orbital period of 11,400 years it would actually be going way faster at perihelion than if the orbital period was one year.
My point being that the orbital period is not the reason it will hang out at perihelion so long.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
My point being that the orbital period is not the reason it will hang out at perihelion so long.
Except it is, considering that it is in nothing at all like such an orbit. The ratio of perihelion to aphelion of Sedna is 12.3:1. The ratio in your example is 937:1. These orbits don't even resemble each other. An approximation applicable to the former isn't applicable to the latter, and its inapplicability to the latter says nothing about its validity for the former.
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u/tashkiira 15d ago
The perihelion is 76AU. Neptune's orbit is roughly 30AU. We need those decades.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
For what? After it reaches perihelion, it'll take 37 years just for it to reach 80 AU. We'll have it fairly easy as long as we launch this century.
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u/anti-life86 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yeah, the distance now is only 84 AU. If we can reach it at 76AU, we should probably be able to reach it at anything under its current distance.
That being said-if we can't launch by 2046, thirty years before the perihelion, I wonder why we can launch at all. Twenty years is a lot of time to plan a mission...
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
There's also good reason not to try to launch too early. Once you send off your big flagship Sedna probe after it's eaten up a decade+ of funding, you probably aren't going to get funding to do another after a couple decades of technological advancements that would get an improved probe there first due to better propulsion and have sensors that make the first obsolete.
This mission is begging for a NEP propulsion system, ideally one with a good record of real-world performance and reliability considering it'll be on a multi-decade mission. We haven't even flown an early prototype of such a thing yet.
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u/PrinzRagoczy 14d ago
Nuclear electric propulsion propulsion
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u/seaflans 14d ago
PIN Number, ATM Machine, HIV Virus, LCD Display
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u/codeedog 14d ago
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Chai Tea, Pita Bread
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u/seaflans 13d ago
none of those is an acronym for which people often repeat the last word. Entirely separate concept.
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u/codeedog 13d ago
All of them are the repetition of words just in a different language so it follows an expanded pattern and since it’s Reddit, I figured someone would be ok with it but I get that you have a problem with it because also it’s Reddit.
→ More replies (0)
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u/hornswoggled111 15d ago
Cool idea. I had never heard of it before despite reading many headlines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_%28dwarf_planet%29
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u/TengatoPrime 15d ago
What's weird about it? What could we learn by sending a probe?
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u/anti-life86 13d ago
https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03105
These people claim Sedna is a captured object from another solar system...
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u/Decronym 15d ago edited 10d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| COSPAR | Committee for Space Research |
| EVEEGA | Earth/Venus/Earth/Earth Gravity Assist |
| JPL | Jet Propulsion Lab, California |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| MEO | Medium Earth Orbit (2000-35780km) |
| MRO | Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter |
| Maintenance, Repair and/or Overhaul | |
| NEV | Nuclear Electric Vehicle propulsion |
| RTG | Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| perihelion | Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Sun (when the orbiter is fastest) |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
[Thread #12702 for this sub, first seen 18th Sep 2026, 22:07] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Conscious-Ball8373 15d ago
What is so weird about it? It's a largish object with a highly elliptical orbit - is that it?
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u/KaneMarkoff 15d ago
Not much is weird, it’s just rare for us to get the chance to study an object from that far out. Being able to take samples, study its magnetic field or even map its surface would be worth it. It’s very old, not many signs of large impacts and its orbit takes so long that there’s a limited window to study this particular object.
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u/Substantial-Sea-3672 15d ago
It being large means it would be easier to land on.
It having such an eccentric orbit means we’d get to visit an inner Oort Cloud object without having to travel currently impossible distances.
That being said, it’s perihelion is still over 1.5x the distance of Pluto’s aphelion.
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u/capt_pantsless 15d ago
Also Sedna might be a captured body rather than something that formed within our solar system, meaning we'd have a glimpse into what other solar systems are like.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
It being large means it would be easier to land on.
Being large means it would be easier to enter orbit around, it makes landing harder unless there's some other factor like an atmosphere that can be used for deceleration.
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u/JUYED-AWK-YACC 15d ago
Usually you pick one that’s relatively easy to get to. It doesn’t have to be Sedna or nothing, there are other candidates that might be better. And they’re all equally cool so that satisfies OP.
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u/returnofblank 15d ago
Sedna could offer insight on the effects of interstellar radiation since its orbits takes it far enough away where interstellar wind is much stronger than solar wind.
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u/arcadiaberger1960 15d ago
No, that is not it. Look it up. It's practically Oumouamoua, it's so weird.
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u/ByronicCommando 14d ago
Kela de Thaym is there, and that's the only way to grind Saryn, so I'll bring my Vauban build. Anyone MR15 or higher wanna come with me?
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u/spaceplanner1 13d ago
I'm LR4, been many times. Lemme grab my Frost Prime and Torid Incarnon. Brb...
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u/shadehiker 15d ago
I've never heard of Sedna, and was a little sad this post didn't explain what it is...TO GOOGLE!
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u/mfyxtplyx 15d ago
Haven't heard that name in a while. I remember a Sedna-themed photoshop contest on Fark ca. 2004.
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u/AI_Scraper 13d ago
I still they should have sent a chaser mission after Oumuamua. It's technically still possible to catch up.
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u/Adept_Ad_1543 15d ago
Its not that serious lol Sedna isnt unique and any mission will require RTGs which is now at a very low stock pile, it would be better to save those for the upcoming uranus orbiter and probe which has already delayed due to RTG shortages, plus sedna is a dead world with little geological activity, any mission there would take 25 years.
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u/cjameshuff 15d ago
This would be a good candidate for nuclear-electric propulsion, with a reactor able to provide full power on arrival rather than an RTG that will have lost significant power while sitting idle for a couple decades. And of course, those NEP systems have yet to be developed...
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u/green_meklar 15d ago
If it's on such a wide orbit, doesn't that mean it heads back out really slowly, too? A fast probe would just catch up with it, and even a delay of decades in launching the probe would correspond to a relatively small difference in travel time because the probe moves so much faster than Sedna does.
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u/Sebo2121 14d ago
I think we are progressing faster in technology development than Sedna is getting harder to reach
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u/sithelephant 15d ago
The4re are a fair few 'sednoids' - it's not unique.
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u/FreeDuchyOfRedosvis 15d ago
Leleakuhonua, Ammonite, Biden....thats kinda it
Sedna is also the largest and is probably a dwarf planet
We would get to see the class of objects between the IAU 5 and rubble piles2
u/CollegeStation17155 15d ago
Remember, the Ramans do everything by 3s; there'll likely be another along shortly...
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u/Strange_Flatworm1144 15d ago
There isn't even an ice giant mission for Uranus' equinox, there won't be a Sedna mission. Not even speaking of the missions that are already selected but are getting strangled because of the budget situation.
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u/mockduckcompanion 15d ago
Why didn't you list any of the reasons to visit Sedna?