A strange sequence of events

An enigmatic interstellar visitor, a grand failure of our space-based instruments and ever-gathering conspiracy theorists… Russ Swan considers a peculiar series of events

There's something odd going on, and careful assessment of the data leads to an astonishing conclusion. I can hardly believe it myself.

Over the last few months, a series of apparently unconnected events has taken place in a number of disparate locations. But are they really unconnected, and are the places really disparate?

In September, an astronomical observatory in New Mexico, USA, was raided and shut down by the FBI. That in itself is probably a unique event. When else has a telescope posed a threat to (US) national security, outside of a 1950s B-movie?

Then a number of spacecraft began behaving, well, oddly.

In October, the venerable Hubble Space Telescope suffered a reported gyro failure and was placed into safe mode. The thing has six gyros, used to maintain its orientation so that it can make long exposures of distant and faint objects and return to the same spot later. It needs three operational gyros to do this.

Hubble is one of the most spectacularly successful scientific instruments ever built, but also has a history of issues with build quality and maintenance. When deployed in 1990, its optics were incorrectly specified – but this wasn't discovered until after it had been launched.

“A number of telescopes and other space hardware have gone offline, at about the same time, in locations throughout the solar system. That's a bit odd, isn’t it?”

Three years later, a servicing mission by Space Shuttle restored most of the optical quality the telescope should have had in the first place, and replaced a number of dodgy components including four of the six gyros. A handful of further services, the most recent (and probably last) being in 2009, saw further instrument upgrades and further replacements of gyros.

But three of them have since failed again, apparently, while a fourth showed signs of failure in the last few weeks. A slightly advanced version of the turn-it-off, turn-it-back-on-again trick seems to have restored function, which is just as well as there are currently no crew-rated spacecraft capable of reaching the telescope for further repairs. Even so, Hubble was off-line for a while.

This isn’t the only orbital observatory in trouble. The Kepler space telescope is credited with discovering about 2,700 exoplanets during its nine-year mission, but in late October Nasa announced that it had run out of fuel and was dead. At least, that's what we were told.

Meanwhile the so-called next generation space telescope, the James Webb, has suffered yet further delays to its deployment. Originally scheduled for launch in 2007, this now can't happen until at least 2021. Twenty years ago, it was going to be launched in ten years' time. Ten years ago, it was going up six years in the future. Today, it is scheduled for three years hence. In other words, the time until launch is decreasing by about half each decade.

Running out of gas is becoming a bit of a trend, up there in the ether. The Dawn probe was the first spacecraft to properly explore the main asteroid belt and visited two of the largest worlds there, Vesta and Ceres. It was pronounced dead, out of fuel, on 1 November.

Also out of juice is the veteran Mars rover Opportunity. It was caught in a planet-wide dust storm in June, which is said to have rendered its solar cells useless. Not a peep has been heard from it for five months.

In other words, a number of telescopes and other space hardware have gone offline, at about the same time, in locations throughout the solar system. That's a bit odd, isn’t it?

As mentioned earlier, there is an obvious and startling explanation.

A little over a year ago, astronomers detected an object passing through our solar system, unlike anything seen before. Its trajectory revealed that it came from another system altogether, while its pattern of brightness suggested a very odd shape indeed. Named 'Oumuamua, it is probably a cigar shape (some more recent suggestions hint at a plate or saucer shape), dark red, and about 400m long. Its behaviour is just as unusual, being unlike either a comet or an asteroid. Most recently, it was found to be changing its velocity as it departed our neighbourhood. This acceleration is just the latest of the object's enigmas.

Drawing all these threads together, we must not shirk from the uncomfortable conclusion that presents itself. No matter how much we, as rational scientists, might like to think otherwise, it is staring us in the face.

…It isn’t aliens.

It's never aliens. Coincidences happen, and conspiracy theorists love them, but the truth is always the most boring of the possibilities. Sorry about that.

Russ Swan