Project Lyra develops concepts for reaching interstellar objects such as 1I / 'Oumuamua and 2I / Borisov with a spacecraft, based on near-term technologies. But what is an interstellar object? Laser sail spacecraft arriving at 'Oumuamua, the interstellar asteroid (Credit: Maciej Rebisz) What is 1I/'Oumuamua and what is an Interstellar Object? On October 19th 2017, the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala discovered a fast-moving object near the Earth, initially named A/2017...