Adam Hibberd I was recently referred to a paper by Farnocchia et al which apparently, so was it argued, contradicted the notion that 1998 KY26 could be technogenic (man made), in other words a spacecraft. For the uninitiated, 1998 KY26 has always been considered (up-to-recently at least) a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) of some form […]
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Members Newsletter – July
News from i4is I4is return to the Royal Institution, London, UKTwo more of our popular workshops “Skateboards to Starships” are returning this summer to the Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle St, London W1S 4BS.24 August 2026 see https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/holiday-workshops-skateboards-starships-year-10-1325 August 2026 see https://www.rigb.org/whats-on/holiday-workshops-skateboards-starships-year-7-9 Europlanet Science Congress 2026The Europlanet Conference takes place in The Hague, The Netherlands from […]
The Clock is Ticking on Project Lyra
Adam Hibberd Where are the Interstellar Objects (ISOs)? A new observatory (Vera C. Rubin) has been operating for a month and has not yet found any. A month of Vera C. Rubin is probably not long enough for scientists to change models of their abundance. If nothing after a year? Maybe scientists might start considering […]
Members Newsletter – June
There’s no shortage of incredible interstellar content to choose from this month. I4is researchers published! Preliminary Analysis into the Feasibility of Missions to Asteroid 2024 YR4We are delighted that our lead astrodynamicist Adam Hibberd and our friend T Marshall Eubanks (Space Initiative Inc, USA) have a paper published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and […]
Principium 53
Principium 53 has gone out to subscribers and is now accessible to all
Members Newsletter – May
The Board of Directors of i4is and the Editor of Principium will make the following announcement in the next issue of Principium:”The i4is Board has been considering the future of Principium, given changes in the ways in which people receive and consume information and content. We have decided to pause the publication of Principium with […]
What’s up with 1998 KY26?
Adam Hibberd I’m not sure whether you might already be aware of this but there are really weird objects orbiting the Sun which astronomers have observed and tried to categorize as a new class of object, ‘the dark comets’. But what makes them weird? It’s the rather strange fact that the peculiar orbital paths they […]
Mission to an Interstellar Object
Adam Hibberd Many readers in-the-know will have heard of the future ESA ‘Comet Interceptor’ mission, due to launch in 2029. For those not-in-the-know it is a spacecraft desgined to loiter at the famous Sun/Earth Lagrange 2 (L2) point for a few years, waiting for a ‘pristine’ Oort Cloud comet to come flying in to the […]