Earlier this month, astronomers noticed a mysterious object speeding toward the inner solar system from outside of our star system.
It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence, marking only the third confirmed interstellar object to have ventured into our solar system, all of which have been detected since 2017.
Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb was quick to raise the tantalizing — albeit admittedly far-fetched — possibility that the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, could have been an alien probe sent to us by an intelligent civilization.
And now, in a twist right out of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he’s suggesting a way that we could use an existing spacecraft to intercept the object’s path to test that very hypothesis.
In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, the researcher argued that NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which was designed to study Jupiter and launched in 2011, could get eerily close to 3I/ATLAS by March 14, 2026.
Juno would have to apply a thrust of 1.66 miles per second on September 14, 2025, Loeb calculated, to intercept the mysterious object’s path.
“The close encounter of 3I/ATLAS to Jupiter provides a rare opportunity to shift Juno from its current orbit around Jupiter to intercept the path of 3I/ATLAS at its closest approach to Jupiter,” he wrote in a new blog post about the proposal.
While it’s technically not a rendezvous — the object’s “excessively high hyperbolic speed” wouldn’t allow for such a meeting — Juno’s arsenal of scientific instruments “can all be used to probe the nature of 3I/ATLAS from a close distance,” Loeb argued.
Whether the spacecraft, which has been soaring through space for 14 years now, would have enough fuel to even pull off such a stunt remains unclear.
But Loeb argues it could “rejuvenate Juno’s mission and extend its scientific lifespan beyond” the potential intercept some eight months from now.
The news comes as scientists are still racing to get a better sense of 3I/ATLAS’ exact nature. Last week, the recently inaugurated Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile had a closer look, finding that the object is roughly seven miles wide, making it the largest interstellar object ever spotted.
The prevailing and most widely accepted theory suggests that 3I/ATLAS is a comet, with previous observations supporting the idea that its coma, or surrounding cloud of ice, dust, and gas, was anywhere up to 15 miles across.
The Vera C. Rubin observations identified large amounts of dust and water ice surrounding its solid nucleus, as detailed in a July 17 preprint, further adding evidence that it’s a comet.
Yet many questions surrounding its origin remain a mystery. Some researchers believe it came from our galaxy’s “thick disk,” a dense layer that features chemically distinct populations of stars.
Other researchers suggest it could be around three to 11 billion years old, dating it back to the earliest days of the Milky Way.
It seems unlikely that NASA will find Loeb’s suggestion compelling enough to fire up Juno’s thrusters for an intercept. But it’s an extremely rare opportunity to finally get a close glimpse of an interstellar visitor nonetheless — so hopefully they’re at least checking his math to see if it’s possible.
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