Object Spotted Near Earth May Be Ancient Spacecraft
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is no stranger to advancing eyebrow-raising ideas.
For example, he recently hypothesized that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, generally believed by his colleagues to be a comet, is an artifact sent to us by an alien civilization. He even suggested that the rare visitor might be behind the “Wow! Signal,” an unusual radio emission that has baffled scientists since its detection in 1977.
Now, a new blog postLoeb suggests that the newly identified quasi-satellite (a small object with an Earth-like orbit) may also be a visitor from a long-dead intelligent civilization.
Twisting? The civilization in question would be the Soviet Union. Specifically, the researcher said that 2025 PN7second month“First discovered in August to be temporarily captured by the Earth’s gravitational pull, it may be the remnants of the USSR’s Zond 1 mission launched in April 1964 – a promising theory that is not as far-fetched as it seems.
The Zond 1 probe was the second Soviet spacecraft to reach Venus and the first lander sent there. However, technological problems caused the scientists to lose communication long before reaching the intended target.
With the help of Loeb’s colleague Adam Hibberd, a software engineer at the nonprofit Interstellar Probes Initiative, Loeb attempted to retrace the Zond 1 mission’s interplanetary orbit and compared it to the 2025 PN7s.
Their continuing theory: Zond 1 struggled to boost itself enough to reach Venus, orbiting the Sun in a long-lost orbit — only to be found again as what astronomers now call quasi-satellite 2025 PN7. (Alternatively, Loeb suggested that 2025 PN7 could be the upper stage of the rocket that launches Zond 1.)
TLoeb and Hibberd suggest “measurement of the 2025 PN7 spectrum” to put their hypothesis to the test; this measurement “could potentially reveal surface composition and test whether its origin is technological.”
Surprisingly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a near-Earth remnant of human-made technology resurface, dating back to the 1960s. In September 2020, the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii detected an object orbiting the Sun called 2020 SO. Identified as the Centaur upper stage of NASA’s Surveyor 2 mission.
The mission, the space agency’s second uncrewed lunar lander, was launched in September 1966. However, the spacecraft lost control due to course correction error and was doomed to orbit the Sun for more than half a century.
More about Loeb: Mysterious Interstellar Object Could Hit the Brakes, Scientist Says
