Adam Hibberd
When you have a surprise, uninvited visitor gatecrash your party, you are liable to treat them cautiously at first and then after a visual appraisal reveals they are worthy of acceptance, maybe curiosity will strike and you may start asking questions to find out more about them. You may by the end of this social interaction, and before the visitor has left, have discovered enough about the individual to form a fairly accurate notion of who they are and what they are like.
Well, the latest, and third, gatecrasher to our abode is a celestial body, an interstellar object (ISO) to be exact, from somewhere else in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. Furthermore, unlike all other objects we have observed orbiting the Sun (apart from the preceding 2 ISOs of course), it does NOT actually belong here and originated from some other System a long time ago, 7 billion years is one estimate, considerably older than our Solar System.
It was discovered on 1st July 2025 and later named 3I/ATLAS, since contrary to my expectations, it was not discovered by the recently operational Vera C. Rubin Telescope, but instead ATLAS – the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, though useful precovery images were subsequently found in the Rubin data archive a full month before 3I/ATLAS was discovered, and also even prior to this, images further back were taken by the TESS space telescope.
Now when I received the news of the arrival of this ISO, I was distinctly unenthusiastic because I was still in the process of conducting research into so-called ‘Dark Comets’ and what they could be, and this thing was an unwelcome distraction. However, an acquaintance of mine who works with ISEC (the International Space Elevator Consortium) expressed surprise that I had not paid more attention to this object, especially in the context of investigating missions to it, and was unimpressed with the work I had instead been prioritizing.
Furthermore, news about the object was beginning to flood in from a myriad of sources and various connections of mine, in particular Marshall Eubanks and Avi Loeb. For instance, it was quite clear early on, according to Avi, that he thought this was a very strange phenomenon, since despite its brightness, there was no spectroscopic signature for the presence of volatiles (such as water or ammonia, carbon dioxide and the like), which would point to it being a comet. This lack of evidence would indicate the calculated size for 3I/ATLAS, ~20 km, was not a result of a cometary coma, but that it genuinely WAS indeed that big - an asteroid in other words - 2 orders of magnitude larger than the previous 2 observed ISOs. Such a gargantuan object should only happen very rarely compared to 1I/’Oumuamua type objects, so how come we had observed one so soon after 1I/’Oumuamua, there should be millions of ‘Oumuamuas before even one 3I/ATLAS?
It so happens that I was, at the time, in regular touch with Adam Crowl on Facebook, where the huge distance between he in Brisbane and me in Coventry was – so-it-appeared - magically nullified as we were able to discuss instantaneously the strangeness of 3I/ATLAS as though we were in the same room.
It was as a result of one such conversation that I decided to do some work on the astrodynamics of 3I/ATLAS, the most obvious approach being to consider the feasibility of missions from Earth to 3I/ATLAS. Having largely performed this analysis, I concluded that missions to 3I/ATLAS were simply out-of-the-question, either direct routes, or indirect. It was only later that it suddenly occurred to me – why not address the reverse route? – i.e. what would it take for 3I/ATLAS to intercept the Earth? That’s a simple reversal of calculations that OITS was designed to accommodate very easily, and the results were extremely illuminating. The relative ease of an intercept of Earth, for example, seemed initially inconsequential, but with further deliberation, the value of this research eventually dawned on me – what if 3I/ATLAS WAS alien tech, in precisely the way Avi had argued? - then these results showed how little effort would be needed for a probe – or weapon - sent from 3I/ATLAS to intercept Earth.
In a moment of gay abandon, I decided to share this plot with Avi Loeb and to my surprise - though in retrospect why should I have been? - he was extremely accepting of the premise that this object could be alien technology and suggested collaborating on a paper on the subject. His decision was no-doubt partly informed by the fact that he had suggested in a previous paper (here) that the rareness of such a large object could well be explained if it had been directed on its path by alien intelligence. In view of my previous conversation with Adam C., I mooted that he be a co-author and so a very contentious research paper was born.
Someone had to write the skeleton, and since I clearly had more time and also the necessary latex skills (latex is a kind of language used by scientists for neat and tidy science paper generation), I came up with the initial draft which then the other two contributed to. The paper can be found here.
I shan’t go into a detailed description of how the paper was received by the science community as most readers will be aware of this. It was hardly unpredictable that it would be entirely misrepresented and for that matter completely misunderstood by certain social media commentators. Arguments surfaced such as it ‘claimed 3I MUST be alien technology because….’ This latter was largely typical of the level of debate concerning the research and a wholly misleading summary of the paper, since we had ‘claimed’ nothing of the sort. We HAD ‘claimed’ that the object was most likely a comet, and we had only ‘hypothesised’ otherwise, a stark and clear fact which was almost entirely overlooked by most of the negative social media commentary.
I’ve reached an age when I get a wee bit tired of the prejudice and extremist nonsense pedalled by so many critics of papers such as ours. The reason for this is that many, many advances in science research have been at the peripheral of what has at the time been considered acceptable, mainstream and orthodox scientific dogma, and although the paper was probably incorrect in its hypothesis (that remains to be seen), nevertheless surely we should have learned by this time of the dangers of prematurely casting out what might be considered on the fringe of science? - we should not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Email conversations between Avi, Adam C. and I then tended towards the subject of missions, and the Juno probe soon became dominant in our thinking. Adam C. did some calculations which showed that at perijove (closest it gets to Jupiter), Juno was teetering on brink of Jupiter escape, with a velocity kick of only a few hundreds of metres per second necessary to send the probe on a course out of the Jovian system. The relevance of this fact was that ‘The Object’ (as Adam C. had christened it) would come close to Jupiter on March 16th 2026 – in fact within 0.36 au of the planet, becoming a possible target for the Juno spacecraft as the mission could be repurposed to probe this ISO.
When I used OITS to investgate Juno missions to 3I/ATLAS, two windows of opportunity presented themselves: in mid-August and in mid-September of 2025. These windows were so soon, this immediately sent alarm bells ringing and we contacted NASA immediately, setting in motion the publication of the preprint on arXiv, whilst I continued on with research to answer the question :’how close could Juno actually get?’
It hardly surprised me that in the meantime a certain unmentioned scientist who had been so cynical of the first paper, then attacked the second paper, taking my quite legitimate, though admittedly politically naïve, answer to a question of his on social media and then parading it in front of his many followers and prefacing it with a sarcastic ‘FWIW’ (For What It’s Worth). I have been reassured by one of my colleagues that this particular individual tended to be much more ‘nuanced’ in a personal conversation he had engaged him in at a science conference and only seemed to reserve this hostile manipulation to his activity on social media. I confess to be distinctly unimpressed by this attempt at an excuse.
Nevertheless I continued on with my relentless battle against my mental health condition and eventually the required results necessary to complete the paper (now here) were forthcoming, showing that Juno could get significantly closer to 3I/ATLAS with only 5.4% propellant remaining in the tank.
It still remains to be seen whether NASA believe they can restart the Juno engine, and even if it can, how much propellant might be left in the tanks. However one should be mindful that this probe was slated for termination by the end of September anyhow, with a kamikaze plunge into Jupiter’s atmosphere, so instead maybe a slightly perilous manoeuvre, and an extension of its mission would be worth the risk?
So all-in-all an exciting few weeks for me personally as well as the scientific community as a whole. Weeks where I learned the humility of being a scientist – let the facts speak for themselves – and never, EVER allow yourself to introduce your own deeply prejudiced perspective into someone else’s motives. My motive as a scientist is always, ALWAYS to find the truth and until that truth is found, hypothesis (based on evidence) but possibly not wild speculation (based on no evidence) should be encouraged and NOT scorned.