NASA scientists revel new photos of 3I/ATLAS — see the sharpest images of the Manhattan-sized comet - video Dailymotion

Watch NASA scientists revel new photos of 3I/ATLAS — see the sharpest images of the Manhattan-sized comet - New York Post on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00Here's one of the images from the closest physical instrument we had to the comet,

00:04from the high-rise instrument on our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,

00:07taken on October 2nd as the comet sailed by at a distance of 19 million miles from the instrument.

00:12You can see that Comet 3i Atlas looks like a fuzzy white ball.

00:16That ball is a cloud of dust and ice called the coma,

00:18which is shed by the comet as it continues its trajectory towards the sun.

00:22NASA's Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 35th birthday earlier this year.

00:26And not too long after that, in July, it looked at 3i Atlas,

00:31not long after we discovered it from the ground.

00:34At this point, 3i Atlas was about 277 million miles from Earth.

00:40And what Hubble's images revealed was a few things.

00:42First, a teardrop-shaped coma of dust coming off that solid, icy nucleus of the comet itself.