Asteroid 1998 KY26 accelerates unexplained; Loeb suggests lost Soviet probe, NASA sees asteroid

Right · 21998 KY26, a roughly 36-foot (about school-bus-sized) object generally believed to be a near-Earth asteroid, is accelerating in a way that the gravity of the sun and planets does not explain. 1 2 Right · 1The object spins once every 5.35 minutes, which the Daily Mail calls extremely fast for a space rock; the unexplained push was first noticed in 2023 from 25 years of telescope data. 1 Right · 2A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Icarus by Georgia Tech researchers Korbin Hansen and Masatoshi Hirabayashi found the object is likely too warm for buried water ice to survive long enough to explain the acceleration, concluding it is likely a dehydrated asteroid and that calculated water-loss rates "preclude 1998 KY26 being a dark comet at present". 2 1

Right · 2Harvard physicist Avi Loeb and co-authors Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, in a study on arXiv, argue the object could be Phobos 1, a Soviet probe launched in 1988 that stopped communicating on its way to Mars. 1 2 Right · 1They say a simplified Phobos 1 model matched eight sets of brightness observations, and that sunlight pressing on a cylinder or solar panels better matched hundreds of telescope and radar observations; the authors say this cannot be conclusive but adds "strong weight" to the hypothesis, which they call "strongly plausible but presently unproven". 2 Right · 1Fox News reports that earlier research found sunlight and escaping heat could produce the extra push without buried water, and that a separate study in Astronomy & Astrophysics found the object's light consistent with a rocky asteroid likely from the inner asteroid belt. 2

Right · 1NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said on Fox & Friends that nothing is about to hit Earth and that he has seen no evidence KY26 is a threat or anything other than an asteroid, though NASA continues to monitor it. 2 Right · 1The Daily Mail says the object is about 189 million miles away and will pass within 32 million miles in 2028, with the European Space Agency saying it comes within 10 million miles in 2039. 1 Right · 2Japan's Hayabusa2 is due to reach the object in 2031 (July, per Fox News), which Loeb says will test his idea: he predicts its cameras will reveal the label "Made in the U.S.S.R." 2 1