We live in a wondrous age. The notoriously weird comet 3I/ATLAS, which has captured people’s imagination as some astrophysicists out there think it might be mysterious alien tech, while others think it’s just the comet that does weird stuff, has been photographed by NASA from not just one planet, but two—Earth and Mars.
The weirdo space object that’s older than the solar system it’s passing through was photographed by NASA’s Perseverance rover as it whizzed by Mars in early October. Back on Earth, the European Space Agency’s Trace Gas Orbiter and China’s Tianwen-1 also snapped some pics, but NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter landed the sharpest images.
Since 3I/ATLAS will only come within 269 million kilometers of Earth on December 19, Mars is the best place for close-ups. But NASA didn’t stop there. Sun-watching missions like STEREO, SOHO, and PUNCH tracked the comet as it vanished behind the Sun, and even deep-space asteroid missions got in on the action. Psyche snapped photos from 33 million miles away in early September, and Lucy followed up from 240 million miles. Basically, humanity is using every piece of technology at its disposal to keep tabs on this thing from every angle possible.
Online conspiracy theorists, undeterred by anything even closely resembling a fact, immediately took issue with the graininess of the photos. What do you expect? The thing is 269 million kilometers away at best.
Of course, researchers across the globe are taking pictures for nothing. There’s some real science going on here. The ESA’s Mars data sharpened the comet’s orbital path by a factor of 10. Combine that with NASA’s treasure trove of data collected over several missions, scientists now have the clearest confirmation yet that the once mysterious, possibly alien 3I/ATLAS is… definitely just a comet. Or, at the very least, that’s the way it seems to be behaving. Just a very old, very foreign one. It’s only the third confirmed interstellar object ever found, a frozen relic from a time before our sun even existed.
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