Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is no stranger to furthering eyebrow-raising ideas. <\/p>\n
Lately, for instance, he\u2019s been hypothesizing<\/a> that the interstellar object 3I\/ATLAS \u2014 broadly believed by his peers to be a comet \u2014 is an artifact sent to us by an alien civilization. He has even suggested that the rare visitor may be behind the \u201cWow! Signal<\/a>,\u201d an unusual radio emission that has puzzled scientists since its detection in 1977.<\/p>\n Now, in a new blog post<\/a>, Loeb suggests that a newly-identified quasi-satellite \u2014 a small object with an Earth-like orbit \u2014 may also be a visitor from a long-dead intelligent civilization.<\/p>\n The twist? The civilization in question would be the Soviet Union. Specifically, the researcher suggests that 2025 PN7, a so-called \u201csecond moon<\/a>\u201d that was first discovered<\/a> to have been temporarily captured by the Earth\u2019s gravitational pull in August, could be the remnants of the USSR\u2019s Zond 1 mission, which launched in April 1964 \u2014 a tantalizing theory that isn\u2019t as far-fetched as it sounds.<\/p>\n The Zond 1 probe was the second Soviet spacecraft to reach Venus, and the first lander to have been sent there. However, technological issues resulted in scientists losing contact long before it arrived at its intended destination.<\/p>\n With the help of Loeb\u2019s colleague Adam Hibberd, a software engineer for the nonprofit Initiative for Interstellar Studies, Loeb attempted to retrace the Zond 1 mission\u2019s interplanetary trajectory and compared it to 2025 PN7\u2019s.<\/p>\n Their running theory: Zond 1 struggled to boost itself sufficiently to make it to Venus, circling the Sun in a long-lost orbit \u2014 only to have been found again as what astronomers are now calling quasi-satellite 2025 PN7. (Alternatively, Loeb suggested, 2025 PN7 could be the upper stage of the rocket that launched Zond 1.)<\/p>\n to put their hypothesis to the test, Loeb and Hibberd suggest getting a \u201cmeasurement of the spectrum of 2025 PN7,\u201d which could \u201cpotentially reveal its surface composition and test whether its origin is technological.\u201d<\/p>\n Intriguingly, it wouldn\u2019t be the first time we\u2019ve seen a resurfaced relic of human-made technology close to Earth that dates back to the 1960s. In September 2020, the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii spotted an object orbiting the Sun, dubbed 2020 SO \u2014 which was eventually identified as the Centaur upper stage of NASA\u2019s Surveyor 2 mission<\/a>.<\/p>\n The mission, the space agency\u2019s second uncrewed lunar lander, launched in September 1966. However, the spacecraft lost control due to a course correction failure, dooming it to circle the Sun for over half a century.<\/p>\n