An Ocean Expedition by the Galileo Project to Retrieve Fragments of the First Large Interstellar Meteor CNEOS 2014-01-08

TL;DR

This paper discusses the identification of the first interstellar meteor, CNEOS 2014-01-08, and outlines a planned ocean expedition to retrieve its fragments for further study.

Contribution

It reports the detection and verification of the first interstellar meteor and proposes an expedition to recover its fragments from the ocean floor.

Findings

CNEOS 2014-01-08 is confirmed as the first interstellar meteor.

The meteor's dynamical and compositional properties are analyzed.

An expedition plan to retrieve fragments from the ocean floor is described.

Abstract

The earliest confirmed interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the abundance of interstellar objects of its size $\sim 100\;$ m. This was followed by the discovery of Borisov, which allowed for a similar calibration of its size $\sim 0.4 - 1 \mathrm{\; km}$. One would expect a much higher abundance of significantly smaller interstellar objects, with some of them colliding with Earth frequently enough to be noticeable. Based on the CNEOS catalog of bolide events, we identified in 2019 the meteor detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC as originating from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with 99.999\% confidence. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Defense has since verified that "the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory," making the object the first detected interstellar object and the first detected interstellar meteor. Here, we discuss the dynamical and compositional properties of CNEOS 2014-01-08, and describe our plan for an expedition to retrieve meteoritic fragments from the ocean floor.