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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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00:00This object has just been discovered.
00:033i Atlas was discovered on July 1st by the NASA-funded Atlas Survey.
00:08It was discovered using their telescope at Rio Hurtado in Chile,
00:12and it was first detected as a speck of light moving relative to background stars.
00:16We collected a good amount of data, more than 100 observations.
00:20We know its trajectory fairly well.
00:22We know it came from outside the solar system.
00:24Right now it's inside the orbit of Jupiter,
00:27and is headed for its closest pass to the Sun at the end of October.
00:30That's going to be barely inside the orbit of Mars,
00:33and then it's going to keep going on its way out of the solar system.
00:36From images, we also saw that this object is active,
00:39which means that around the nucleus there is some coma,
00:42which is an indication that this object is, in fact, a comet.
00:45Right now it's hard to say how big this object is,
00:48because being active, the brightness that we see
00:50is partially due to the size of the object,
00:53but also is partially due to the activity,
00:56so we cannot really pinpoint the nucleus size directly.
00:59We have to better understand how active this object is,
01:02and then we can refine the size estimate and get a good idea.
01:06It's moving at a velocity of about 135,000 miles per hour,
01:10so it's going really fast.
01:11For that distance from the Sun, this is really exceptional.
01:14You have to be an interstellar object to be going that fast
01:17at that distance from the Sun.
01:18This object comes nowhere close to the Earth.
01:21It's going to make a pass close-ish to Mars at about 30 million kilometers,
01:25or roughly 20 million miles from the red planet,
01:28but nowhere close to the Earth.
01:29It's not going to make a close approach,
01:31major close approach to any of the planets,
01:33so no risk from this object, just a scientific opportunity.
01:36The more data we get, the better we can measure the position of this object
01:40as it travels through the solar system and it moves out of it.
01:44But we also want to collect physical characterization data.
01:46For instance, we would like to understand better
01:48what the size of this object could be, the composition,
01:51the levels of activity.
01:52We're just bracing ourselves to get as much information as possible.
01:55We're really excited about these objects.
01:57So far, we've discovered three interstellar objects.
01:59The first one was Oumuamua in 2017.
02:01The second one, Borisov in 2019.
02:04And now we have the third one, 3I Atlas.
02:06So it's a rare opportunity, and as a scientific community,
02:10we want to collect as many data as possible to characterize this object
02:14and learn as much as we can.
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