Starting in 2025, the Rubin Observatory in Chile will survey the southern sky every 4 days with a 3.2 gigapixel camera. Statistically, it is expected to discover an interstellar object, like `Oumuamua, every few months.

The fundamental question that my research team will address is whether technological objects lurk among the vast population of interstellar rocks that cross the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. One way to separate artificial objects from natural rocks is through their anomalous propulsion with no gaseous trail, similar to `Oumuamua’s non-gravitational acceleration.

While passing near Earth in 2017, Oumuamua showed no evidence for cometary gas or dust coming off its surface that would provide a natural push through the rocket effect. The decline in Oumuamua’s non-gravitational acceleration with distance from the Sun was not measured accurately enough by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories.

The scaling was consistent with the excess push being inversely proportional to distance squared relative to the Sun, as expected from radiation pressure acting on a thin membrane. Another anomalous object detected by the same Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii three years later, 2020 SO, displayed a similar push by reflecting sunlight and was identified as a rocket booster with thin walls, launched by NASA in 1966.