Adam Hibberd
2025 PN7, the widely touted newly discovered quasi-satellite of the Earth, has stirred-up in me a renewed fascination for identifying apparently natural objects as old derelict interplanetary missions. So is this object natural or technogenic?
If I were to say 50:50 this could be the failed Russian Zond 1 probe to Venus, what would you say about me writing a paper on the subject, with Avi Loeb as second author?
The fact that 2025 PN7 found its way to its current quasi-satellite status in the mid-'60s, immediately opens up the possibility that it may have been an artifact put there as a consequence of either a US or Soviet mission around this time - refer to Figure 1.
The '60s were a particularly productive decade as far as Russian interplanetary missions were concerned, there being many, many missions - and plenty of failures - to Venus over this period of time, and Zond 1 was one of the failures.
There is plenty of evidence that the Blok-L upper stage, the hardware tasked to send the Venus probes on their way to their destination from their Earth parking orbits was notoriously unreliable [1]. But was it for this particular mission?
In fact there is further evidence to support this possibility in that very shortly after its burn, the Zond 1 had to give itself a further boost using its own rocket engine [2] on 1964 April 03, at a distance of only 560,000 km from Earth. Furthermore the probe must have still had a shortfall in velocity, since yet another course correction was necessary later down the line in mid-May.
Communication was eventually lost due to depressurization, at which point the predicted periapsis with Venus was ~100,000 km, but how accurate is this figure?
This evidence is certainly NOT on its own convincing, yet there is a marked similarity between the heliocentric longitudes followed by both the probe and the quasi-satellite at this time - refer to Figure 2.
Furthermore there is evidence that over the course of Zond 1's trajectory, it's distance w.r.t. 2025 PN7 was noticeably small compared to other missions, Figure 3. The associations with the other Venera missions 5-6 and Genesis can be ruled out when one goes into more detail.
So is this object the Zond 1 mission? To be frank I am a tad sceptical, and Avi Loeb and I had our doubts as to whether this research should be published. But, hey, we eventually agreed to, since we decided 'let people make up their own minds'.
I end this blog with that thought, and my confidence to you that I have over the course of the last few months discovered loads of NEOs (Near-Earth Objects), hitherto thought to be natural, are actually defunct space mission derelicts. A paper shall be forthcoming.
Go here for the preprint.
(1) LePage, A. 2025, Zond 1: The First Lander Sent to Venus,
https://www.drewexmachina.com/2020/04/02/zond-1-
the-first-lander-sent-to-venus/
(2) Clark, P. S. 1985, Journal of the British Interplanetary
Society, 38, 74