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Interstellar Comet 3I⧸ATLAS - What NASA Knows So Far
Space.com
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10 hours ago
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey telescope discovered the interstellar comet 3I⧸ATLAS - NASA explains.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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00:00
This object has just been discovered.
00:03
3i Atlas was discovered on July 1st by the NASA-funded Atlas Survey.
00:08
It was discovered using their telescope at Rio Hurtado in Chile,
00:12
and it was first detected as a speck of light moving relative to background stars.
00:16
We collected a good amount of data, more than 100 observations.
00:20
We know its trajectory fairly well.
00:22
We know it came from outside the solar system.
00:24
Right now it's inside the orbit of Jupiter,
00:27
and is headed for its closest pass to the Sun at the end of October.
00:30
That's going to be barely inside the orbit of Mars,
00:33
and then it's going to keep going on its way out of the solar system.
00:36
From images, we also saw that this object is active,
00:39
which means that around the nucleus there is some coma,
00:42
which is an indication that this object is, in fact, a comet.
00:45
Right now it's hard to say how big this object is,
00:48
because being active, the brightness that we see
00:50
is partially due to the size of the object,
00:53
but also is partially due to the activity,
00:56
so we cannot really pinpoint the nucleus size directly.
00:59
We have to better understand how active this object is,
01:02
and then we can refine the size estimate and get a good idea.
01:06
It's moving at a velocity of about 135,000 miles per hour,
01:10
so it's going really fast.
01:11
For that distance from the Sun, this is really exceptional.
01:14
You have to be an interstellar object to be going that fast
01:17
at that distance from the Sun.
01:18
This object comes nowhere close to the Earth.
01:21
It's going to make a pass close-ish to Mars at about 30 million kilometers,
01:25
or roughly 20 million miles from the red planet,
01:28
but nowhere close to the Earth.
01:29
It's not going to make a close approach,
01:31
major close approach to any of the planets,
01:33
so no risk from this object, just a scientific opportunity.
01:36
The more data we get, the better we can measure the position of this object
01:40
as it travels through the solar system and it moves out of it.
01:44
But we also want to collect physical characterization data.
01:46
For instance, we would like to understand better
01:48
what the size of this object could be, the composition,
01:51
the levels of activity.
01:52
We're just bracing ourselves to get as much information as possible.
01:55
We're really excited about these objects.
01:57
So far, we've discovered three interstellar objects.
01:59
The first one was Oumuamua in 2017.
02:01
The second one, Borisov in 2019.
02:04
And now we have the third one, 3I Atlas.
02:06
So it's a rare opportunity, and as a scientific community,
02:10
we want to collect as many data as possible to characterize this object
02:14
and learn as much as we can.
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