But it will be hard to find evidence of these solar system visitors.
. The Artemis program seeks to land humans on the moon later in the 2020s, if all goes to plan.
Predicting what astronauts may find will be difficult, Cabot added, as the two ISOs already spotted are quite different from each other. Borisov is the most similar to other solar system objects that we know about; however, astronomers were surprised by just how much carbon monoxide was present in its composition, he said. 'Oumuamua is even more enigmatic, he said, because there is no"satisfactory theory" that fully explains its composition.
Since astronomers were unable to find typical products of outgassing such as water, instead they are thinking that the object has unique kinds of volatiles on its surface, Cabot said. To better figure out what ISOs are made of more generally, the moon may present one location to gather concrete evidence, he added.Better yet, there may be boots on the lunar surface relatively soon.
Nevertheless, Cabot said, human missions"give us a lot of opportunities for regolith characterization, [meaning] figuring out the composition of the lunar soil, and trying to answer questions about the early solar system."The little we know about ISOs suggests one strong hypothesis for how those craters may be different, he said. ISOs tend to travel at higher speeds compared to other objects within our solar system.
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