HITS Hyperbolic Intercept & Trajectory Solver
Earth photographed from Apollo 17 Artist’s impression of ʻOumuamua
a visitor from another star

Can we catch it?

Every so often, an object from another star system passes through ours, moving fast and never to return. HITS works out what it would take to send a probe out to reach one before it is gone.

Pick a visitor

Three interstellar objects have ever been found. HITS answers for all three.
About this object

The evidence

Claims about the tool, each backed by something you can open or run.

See the check run

The guard that sits in front of every number, shown on a single figure.

Here is the honesty check, shown on one number. HITS takes a real answer for ʻOumuamua, quietly changes a single digit of one figure, and sends both through the same guard every answer has to pass.

loading km²/s²
The real launch energy. Waved through, because it is one of the numbers the solver actually produced.
loading km²/s²
The same number with one digit changed. Caught and flagged as made up, because the solver never produced it.
No AI and no login are involved. The guard only checks each number against the solver's own results, and it never does any math of its own, so it cannot talk itself into letting a close-but-wrong number through. See the raw check output

How each answer is checked

Every number you see is guarded the same way, before it reaches you. Being matched against a real published study is a stronger claim on top of that, and only one of the three can make it.
1I / ʻOumuamua
Computed here, and matched against the published Project Lyra figures (Hein et al. 2019).
2I / Borisov
Computed the same way. No one has published a study to check it against, so HITS does not claim one.
3I / ATLAS
Computed the same way. No one has published a study to check it against, so HITS does not claim one.

Who wrote the answer

Written by Granite, then checked number by number against the solver before you saw it.
Written by the deterministic template. HITS serves it when Granite is unavailable, and also when the generated answer would be the worse one, thinner than the template or claiming something the solver did not. Still every number gated, just not the model's phrasing.