Maybe it is indeed an artifact of intelligent life, but it is a dead husk of a craft, no longer powered but merely drifting according to Newtonian Law.
If it comes around again, I hope it enters our atmosphere and lands on Macross Island. Because that's when the fun starts.
Unfortunately, based on its path, it’s never coming back again. It went through too quickly for the sun to capture it, so this is the last we’re going to see of it unless it turns out to really be something artificial that reacts to our presence.
If it is a machine, and was simply sent in on an unpowered trip through our solar system to see if we’d try to interact with it, and we manage to “wake it up”, presumably it would then perform some kind of maneuver to allow it to come back for a closer look, or pick up passengers, or whatever its mission is.