Episode 69 of SfS — Rendezvousing with an Interstellar Object (with Dr. Alan Stern) — is now live!
Hello all, it’s been a while, I know. Life has been crazy lately. Luckily, I’ve managed to find the time to podcast again. For this latest episode, I had a conversation with Dr. Alan Stern, an astrophysicist from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission. In a recent paper, Stern and his colleagues performed a concept study for an Interstellar Object Explorer (IOE), a mission that could rendezvous with interstellar objects (ISO).
In 2017, the first-ever ISO detected passed through our system — ‘Oumuamua — leaving astronomers intrigued and baffled. Based on the available data, the object defied classification, leading to some rather exotic explanations! Two years later, a second ISO (2I/Borisov) was detected, which was clearly identified as an interstellar comet. In the near future, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will become operational and will begin detecting dozens of ISOs a year.
Hence the desire for a spacecraft that could rendezvous with the next ISO that graces us. As Stern and I discuss, an IOE mission could have profound implications for astronomy, cosmology, and astrobiology. Studying ISOs would tell us a great deal about other star systems without actually having to go there. And if just a tiny fraction of those happened to be debris from an extraterrestrial civilization, as Prof. Loeb has suggested, the implications would be astronomical (no pun!)
Check out the links below to hear the entire conversation…
Where to Listen:
Originally published at http://storiesbywilliams.com on April 5, 2024.
