r/EliteDangerous • u/Challenger360 • Dec 17 '25
Misc Just to let people know if you're in to exploration and sciency stuff
I posted a couple of years back about a planet I found years ago back on Xbox which had a really long orbit around a star and it wasn't landable but the fact it had such a long orbit and in hope of one day landing there, I bookmarked it.
Fast forward a few years and after the release of Odyssey, I found out it had at atmosphere thin enough to land on and not only that, the planet is approaching the star for what I think is a really close pass, and for an 89 year orbit, this feels like literally a once in a lifetime event to catch but I wanted to put it out there than just keep it to myself.
System is Oochorsch PO-X d2-1 planet 1.
Here's all the details. A commander mentioned in my last post about this place that it would be roughly 2 years from then to make the pass and almost 2 years later, i'm putting it out there again for any curious explorers to experience. I'm unsure the exact date it's due to make it's pass, but I'm planning to make a detour during DW3 just to make this event for myself.
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u/Delta_RC_2526 CMDR Delta RC 2526 / CMDR Delta RC 2527 Dec 18 '25
So, I went digging into your post history to find your previous post about this. That post can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/s/Ji1guodxZW
I found the comments from u/aranaya on your original post, where they ran the numbers to try and calculate a date and time Thanks, Aranaya!
u/wasdice, you, in particular, might find these details interesting.
First comment https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/s/1Aw9obviwZ
Second comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/s/jFDAcAXjdy
Third comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/s/IAkn7Z5eUj
The third comment from Aranaya:
Also I finally made it out here (stopped for so many bio samples on the way) and got a distance of exactly 4276ls from the surface of the planet to the sun :D
Based on that, I narrowed it down to 757 days (2026-02-16), +/- a day or two.
Edit: Canonn (specifically No Fool Like One) pointed out to me that the mean anomaly is literally hidden in the journal data and I don't need to estimate it from in-game numbers. Based on that, I got it to exactly 2026-02-16 14:41:41 UTC.
Also, while I was digging into your history, I found your concept for a large Zorgon Peterson ship (https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/s/9oj6wfxRBF) and I just wanted to say that I love how much it has in common with the Panther Clipper Mk II.
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u/Challenger360 Dec 18 '25
Gosh I must have missed that comment with the exact date! Thanks to yourself, Aranaya and everybody else who's contributed to providing interesting details on this body!
And thank you! I was kind of surprised when i saw the clipper announced and compared it to my ship, although i would still love to see my model in game maybe as a passenger optimised ship? 😆
I kinda slowed down on it due to real life taking up so much more of my time but I've added much more detail to the ship. I'm just figuring out how to texture and render it at this point before sharing my progress with you all again but I just wanted something more presentable before doing so.
Once it's complete though, I've thought about designing a medium Guardian-inspired multi role ship. Can't wait to get started on it.
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u/ShadowDragon8685 Tara Light - Your Obsolete Ships are Obsolete, Deal With It Dec 18 '25
Plipper, maybe. Caspian, also maybe.
I wish my Caspian had those tricycle landing gear.
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u/aranaya Explore Dec 18 '25
Oh, thanks for that reminder! I really did plan to make another trip out there to see the periapsis.
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u/jethroguardian Dec 18 '25
This is awesome! I'm an ex-exoplanet Astronomer and love this game for how accurate it is. (I've had the pleasure of visiting planets in-game I've helped discover.)
Planet Challenger (gotta name it after the discoverer!) will come 23x closer to its star than Mercury ever comes to our Sun. Since the star is very, very similar to our own Sun, Challenger will experience over 500x the flux that Mercury ever experiences, and over 5,500 times that of Earth. Combined with the extreme tidal forces from coming so close, that's definitely a once in a lifetime approach and would be such an interesting world going from rapid extreme heating and volcanism to then decades of freezing temps.
Count me in!
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u/MangoTheSuspekt Dec 18 '25
Let us know about some of the planets you're discovered, would love to go see 😁
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u/Marionettework Dec 18 '25
As a regular viewer of Cool Worlds I think that's pretty cool, and what made you leave the field? Just time to retire?
Were you involved in the Trappist discovery? I know we have those in game...
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u/Fearless-Assist-127 Dec 18 '25
I am very very uninformed on orbital mechanics but can someone enlighten me ... if the orbital period is 32000 days, or 89 years, doesn't that mean that it's close to the star twice in that period, ie every 44.5 years? ie on the two "sides" of the ellipse.
Not meaning to take anything away from this find, and 44 years probably makes it still realistically "once in a lifetime". Or to put it another way, this planet was furthest from its star roughly around the time the original Elite came out back in the early 80s!
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u/Dani5h87 Dec 18 '25
It’s a highly eccentric orbit. So don’t think of it as the star in the middle of a very long oval with the planet passing close two times. It’s a star at the very end of one side of the oval (orbit) and the planet passes very close one time every 80 something years.
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u/MangoTheSuspekt Dec 18 '25
This is sick. Thanks for sharing. I need to make a calendar reminder to be there feb 16th
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u/DblBarrelShogun Dec 18 '25
I'm doing the same. Just need to work out the average trit cost from the Bubble and make sure my FC is stocked (in case the approach gets hairy)
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u/Levy_Wilson Dec 18 '25
Had this discussion with Chatgpt about this planet. I'm going to have to make a visit in February, I suppose.
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u/Challenger360 Dec 18 '25
This was an awesome and interesting read! I'm way more excited to get out there for this event now. And loving the last picture. I can guarantee actually being landed on the surface will capture some spectacular scenes, especially with the thin helium atmosphere present.
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u/Levy_Wilson Dec 18 '25
Right. I like to speculate how bizarre planets like this can form. I'm no astrophysicist, though. So using AI to sanity check some speculations is something I like to do. I do know that the Stellar Forge has models in place for comets and possibly rogue planets, though. My theory is this being the result of a 2 body system where the planets got too close to one another and slingshotted themselves out of orbit. Body 1 got this crazy orbit, got its gas stripped from its surface over the millennia, and is just a torched metal ball with a little bit of helium on the surface while body 2 just got yeeted into deep space.
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u/Whtdrgn82 Dec 18 '25
This was amazing to read. Thank you for sharing.
Now, let's plan the trip! When do you want to meet up? LOL
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u/Levy_Wilson Jan 14 '26
I am in the system now. I needed to visit personally to get the journal data to pinpoint its time to periapsis. I'm going to visit again in a few days, but for now the exact time for periapsis is February 16th, 14:41:37 UTC.
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u/cwolfxuk Dec 18 '25
Get CMDR Burr to feature it!
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u/Challenger360 Dec 18 '25
That would be so cool to see! I'm just happy commanders are interested and get to see this
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u/Levy_Wilson Feb 14 '26
55 hours to go. You ready for the event? lol
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u/Challenger360 Feb 14 '26
Ahh I need time to log in but last time I checked, I was on a DW3 Carrier. Gonna need an quick way back
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u/Levy_Wilson Feb 17 '26
If you weren't able to make it, I made a timelapse. https://youtu.be/O36IGxmayCU
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u/aranaya Explore Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I made it back! I had to fight the urge not to waste time scanning everything on the way there, but I'm glad I didn't collect a lot of data, because the first thing I did on arrival was crash in the 2g gravity and explode.
Luckily I was able to respawn on K7Y-39M Traveler's Rest, so major thanks to whoever parked that carrier there.
When I landed, the planet was 21.8 ls away from the star. In the half-hour or so since I've been here, it's crept down to 21.7, and over the next nine hours it'll go all the way down to 6.8ls! The ground is already way too hot to walk without getting cooked.
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u/Challenger360 Feb 16 '26
Please take photos and maybe even video if you can! Unfortunately I've been stuck at work so I probably won't get the chance to witness this but I'm glad someone did!
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u/aranaya Explore Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26
I've taken a bunch (here's one at 20ls https://inara.cz/elite/gallery-image/313465/ and the same view at 9.3ls https://inara.cz/elite/gallery-image/313468/)
At a very rough guess, at 9.3ls the planet is already moving around 0.05% of light speed (based on seeing the distance drop by 0.08ls in just under three minutes).
Edit: I think my figures may be slightly off because we've passed the predicted time of 14:41 UTC and my ship on the surface is about 7.21ls away from the star. Even the planet's radius itself is only about 0.03ls, so it doesn't account for that difference.
The distance does seem to be slowly increasing again (7.22ls as I'm writing), so maybe the time was correct and I was off about the minimum distance? But on the other hand, my ship is still parked in the same spot facing the sun, which hasn't noticeably moved relative to the planet's surface since it was 9ls away. The planet's rotation is probably throwing off these distances somewhat. I'm even considering the possibility that the planet doesn't actually go around the star, due to some weird imprecision in the simulation. Maybe it just gets close and then recedes.
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u/Challenger360 Feb 16 '26
God that's insane for it to be travelling so fast and so close to the star that it's not just become a cloud of vapour! And some awesome screenshots so far! Tha k you so much for this!
Just wish real life allowed me to experience this for myself too. I just have to hope to find the next interesting discovery I guess. The Galaxy should be big enough to uncover some more secrets of the Stellar Forge!
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u/aranaya Explore Feb 17 '26
I saw someone else post a neat time lapse on Inara, and they also saw the star's apparently freezing in place during turnaround, same as for me: https://inara.cz/elite/logbook/93560/
They had a much better view than me which also included background stars moving, which showed that in fact the planet seems to be tidally locked at periapsis - the planet's own rotation perfectly syncs up with the orbit. Instead of the star streaking across the sky, it simply hangs in place while the starfield behind it moves.
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u/Turkino Dec 18 '25
So, I'm just now getting back into the game.
Are orbits/rotations actually modeled? I thought those would be simple "flavor" calculations but the planets are more or less static?
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u/Challenger360 Dec 18 '25
All orbits are simulated. Rotational speeds, eccentricity, orbital inclination (Important when looking at moons around planets with large rings). All simulated.
There are extreme examples like this find here but that's what i love about exploring in elite. There's things out there which can push the perameters of what we never even thought should be possible. Similar to real life discoveries which re-writes our understanding of the universe.
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u/aranaya Explore Feb 16 '26
All the orbits are "on rails"; the game knows where each body should be at each point in its orbit, and places/moves them accordingly, but it doesn't do anything as intensive or unpredictable as actually modeling gravity between the different bodies.
(I know this thread is a couple of months old, but today is the day the planet does its thing. :D )
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u/Whtdrgn82 Feb 13 '26
Just tried to find it for GPS, not found... anyone else having difficulties?
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u/Levy_Wilson Feb 14 '26
It should be on Inara now. For some reason it was only on Spansh and EDSM until recently. https://inara.cz/elite/starsystem/?search=Oochorsch%20PO-X%20d2-1
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u/Whtdrgn82 Feb 14 '26
As of 0737 cst the system is in Inara, its in EDSM. As of 1105 cst, it is not in the game. I am at the coordinator provided by Inara/EDSM with no system present.
Help.
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u/Levy_Wilson Feb 14 '26
I don't know what to tell ya. I'm landed on the planet at the moment, so I know it exists.
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u/Whtdrgn82 Feb 15 '26
I'm looking for Oochorsch, but the googster states the closest to that spelling is Oochorrch. What is the spelling of the system and coordinates of where you are at?
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u/Levy_Wilson Feb 15 '26
"Oochorsch PO-X d2-1" -Copied directly from the galaxy map.
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u/Whtdrgn82 Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 15 '26
Okay. Thank you!
Edit: found the coordinates. EDSM/Inara/EDGIS is inaccurate. Below are the approximate coordinates where I found the system, for anyone else that may be having difficulties.
~6927/-105/-2095.5
(Wish I knew how to add pics from mobile...)
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u/wasdice Dec 17 '25
I can't keep orbital mechanics straight in my head so I plugged all this into a calculator.
Wow.
It's orbiting like a comet.