RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA: Existing NASA Spacecraft Could Intercept the Weird Interstellar Object Cruising Into Our Star System.

It’s an exceedingly rare occurrence, marking only the third confirmed interstellar object to have ventured into our solar system, all of which have been detected since 2017.

Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb was quick to raise the tantalizing — albeit admittedly far-fetched — possibility that the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, could have been an alien probe sent to us by an intelligent civilization.

And now, in a twist right out of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he’s suggesting a way that we could use an existing spacecraft to intercept the object’s path to test that very hypothesis.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, the researcher argued that NASA’s Juno spacecraft, which was designed to study Jupiter and launched in 2011, could get eerily close to 3I/ATLAS by March 14, 2026.

Juno would have to apply a thrust of 1.66 miles per second on September 14, 2025, Loeb calculated, to intercept the mysterious object’s path.

On a side note, spotting three interstellar objects all since 2017 makes me think it isn’t “an exceedingly rare occurrence,” but just stuff we’ve gotten better at spotting.