Interstellar Comet 3I⧸ATLAS - What NASA Knows So Far - video Dailymotion

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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

Transcript

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.

Interstellar Comet 3I⧸ATLAS - What NASA Knows So Far

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