A Harvard astrophysicist is disputing NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s assessment of a small, fast-moving space object, arguing it cannot simply be classified as an asteroid.
The object, known as 1998 KY26, is roughly 36 feet wide and has long been considered a near-Earth asteroid. But it is accelerating in a way that gravity alone cannot explain, prompting scientists to search for alternative explanations.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and his colleagues have proposed one striking possibility: that KY26 could actually be Phobos 1, a Soviet spacecraft that lost contact while en route to Mars in 1988.
Isaacman addressed the object Thursday during an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” saying, “I’ve not seen any evidence to suggest this is…anything other than an asteroid.”
Loeb pushed back in an interview with Fox News Digital on Friday. “Well, first of all, it’s not an asteroid because 1998 KY26 appears to have non-gravitational acceleration, meaning it’s being pushed by some force other than gravity, and asteroids are just rocks,” Loeb said.
Competing Theories
Scientists have floated several ideas to explain the object’s unusual acceleration. One theory holds that KY26 is a “dark comet” — a rocky body behaving like a comet without producing a visible tail or cloud of gas.
New research from Georgia Tech, however, casts doubt on whether KY26 could retain enough ice to produce that effect. Other research has suggested that pressure from sunlight, combined with heat radiating from the object’s surface, could account for the acceleration.
Loeb’s team instead found that KY26’s trajectory closely resembles that of the failed Phobos 1 mission. They calculated that sunlight reflecting off the spacecraft’s surface could produce a push consistent with the acceleration observed in KY26. Loeb also pointed to recent observations showing the object is highly reflective and rotates roughly once every five minutes.
Central to Loeb’s skepticism of the dark-comet theory is the absence of any visible tail or escaping material. “It could be a comet shedding some gas backward that is pushing it forward, but in that case we should have seen the gas,” Loeb said. “We should have seen the dust because for comets we see a tail and the dust particles are being pushed away from the sun by the solar radiation.”
“We don’t see a cometary tail. We don’t see any evidence for outgassing around this object. That’s the puzzle,” he added.
An Elephant Without Stripes
Loeb likened the disagreement over how to classify KY26 to misidentifying an unfamiliar animal at a zoo.
“If you are an expert on zebras and you see an elephant, you would say the elephant is a zebra without stripes,” Loeb said. “But that’s an oxymoron because it’s a completely different animal.”
He argued that scientists should remain open to explanations outside the familiar categories of asteroid and comet when observations don’t fit neatly into either. “Innovation in science requires some imagination,” Loeb said. “It requires you to allow for the possibility that our knowledge is incomplete.”
Fox News Digital reached out to NASA for a response to Loeb’s comments and asked whether Isaacman stands by his assessment of KY26.
A 2031 Reckoning
Loeb acknowledged his team’s theory remains unproven, but said a definitive answer may arrive in 2031, when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft is expected to rendezvous with KY26.
He predicts the encounter will reveal a piece of Soviet space history rather than an unusual natural object. “We predict that when they land on it, instead of seeing an iceberg, they will find the label ‘Made in the USSR,'” Loeb said.
Asked whether his Phobos 1 theory would be finished if Hayabusa2 instead finds a rock or piece of ice, Loeb didn’t hesitate: “Yes,” he said.
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