Sam.

Sa.

Let's talk science. Talk about science.

Good afternoon and welcome to NASA's Goddard Space Flight

Center. We are live today with NASA experts who are excited to

share the latest images we have of the interstellar comet 3I ATLAS.

3I means third interstellar and ATLAS refers to

the NASA funded ATLAS Survey telescope which made the discovery.

We are joined today by Amit Shatriya, NASA's associate administrator,

Nikki Fox, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission

Directorate, Sean Domagal Goldman, Director for the Astrophysics

Division, and Tom Statler, Lead Scientist for Solar System

Small Bodies in the Planetary Science Division.

We'll be taking questions from the media on the phone bridge and through social media.

But before we get started, let's learn more about this fascinating

comet and share some images. Amit, kick us off. Hi everyone.

America leads the way in space exploration. As Courtney noted. A NASA

funded telescope, the ATLAS Survey telescope in Chile, first reported observations

of the Comet on July 1, 2025 to the minor Planet Center.

And NASA has been tracking and studying Comet 3I Atlas ever since.

We're here today to give you the latest of what we know about Comet 3i

Atlas and what we still want to know. But first, what is a comet?

It's a small natural solid body that is a combination of rocky and icy material

that evaporates as it gets warm, as it warms when it's close to a star

like the sun. But to start with, I'd like to address the rumors right

at the beginning. I think it's important that we talk about that this object is

a comet. It looks and behaves like a comet and has and all evidence points

to it being a comet. But this one came from outside the solar system,

which makes it fascinating, exciting and scientifically very important.

This is only the third interstellar object like this that humanity has ever found.

A little bit more about the rumors. I think it's very important and I'm

actually very excited that a lot of the world was speculating about the comet

while NASA was in a period where we couldn't speak about it due to the

recent government shutdown. I think what I took away from

that whole experience and watching that as we were working during the shutdown was

just how interested and how excited

people were about the possibility of what this comet could be. There was a lot

of speculation about what it could be. But what I think is really awesome is

that folks are interested in this incredible finding that we observed and that

we have that came from the heavens and what that means, what it could mean

about how magical the universe could be. It expanded people's brains

to think about how magical the universe could be. And I'll tell you, here at

NASA, we think that every day. And so it's really great that you

were able to join us. While we were not able to comment because of the

shutdown constraints about what that comment is, because we think the universe

is a magical place and we spend your treasure and we spend all of our

time trying to make sure that we explore that and share with you as much

as we can. In fact, we want very much to find signs

of life in the universe. In fact, just a few months ago, we were with

you and we talked about what we think might be the signal

from ancient life on the surface of Mars, from our amazing machines that have been

roving the planet for 30 years to look for those things.

That is something that's really important for us to

learn about and discover. It could be an amazing discovery if and when we can

confirm that. But 3I Atlas is a comet.

So my colleagues from the Science Mission Directorate will go through the images in detail.

But just to give you a peek, here's one of the images from the closest

physical instrument we had to the Comet, from the HiRISE instrument on our Mars Reconnaissance

Orbiter taken on October 2 as the comet sailed by at a distance of 19

million miles. From the instrument, you can see that Comet IIIRatlas

looks like a fuzzy white ball. That ball is a cloud of dust and ice

called the coma, which is shed by the comet as it continues its trajectory

towards the sun. I'll leave it to my esteemed colleagues to share further details.

And I'd like to introduce you to the head of NASA science, Nikki Fox.

Thank you so much. It is such a rare opportunity for

us to be able to observe this interstellar comet. And NASA science has

been given this, this really, really exciting opportunity to do it. And literally

from the moment of its discovery, just like Amit said, comets are

tiny cosmic snowballs. And by studying them, we can learn about the environment from

basically where they formed, where they came from. This one

came from a different environment from our own. And so we're already starting to see

some really interesting differences to comets from our own Solar System.

3i Atlas, as you heard, is the third known interstellar

object to pass through our solar system, the first one being identified in

2017. While these types of interstellar objects

have long been predicted, we are just beginning to be able to find them

thanks to the newest technologies with our network of Earth based

telescopes, which are designed to Find small, fast moving objects

in space. The NASA funded Atlas Survey Telescope, which made

the discovery, is part of NASA's Planetary Defense Network.

Our telescopes are always watching the skies to keep us

safe. And in doing so, they occasionally make major scientifically

interesting discoveries just like this one. Right away, of course,

NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office established, they studied it,

and they established that three Eye Atlas is not a danger

to Earth. In fact, it's at least twice, twice as

far away as the distance between the Earth and our Sun.

On October 30, the comet itself reached the closest

it will ever be to the sun when it crossed just inside Mars orbit.

Which is why the image that Amit just showed, he noted it was

the closest instrument physically to the comet because the comet was right

inside the orbit of Mars. Earth was on the opposite side

of the sun, which is about as far away as our planet can possibly

be from Mars. It's been clear from the moment of discovery

that the comet was going to pass on the opposite side of the sun from

where the Earth is. However, it was also clear that its positioning

behind the sun was going to make observations from Earth very, very difficult.

And that is why we are so happy to have our incredible fleet of NASA

science craft all across the solar system. And, boy, were they ready

for this event. NASA's Science Assets on board our

missions have provided the United States the unique capability to observe three

Eye Atlas almost the entire time it passes through our celestial neighborhood.

Everything NASA science does is interconnected, and nearly

20 mission teams have been working together to

really rise to this challenge. 20 mission teams, by the way, and counting.

Everything we're learning about the comet is possible because of the

distribution of all of the different instruments on our spacecraft with different

capabilities. And I'll note that for some of them, we've even

pushed our scientific instruments beyond their normal capabilities,

beyond the things that they were designed to achieve, to allow us to

capture this amazing glimpse at this interstellar

traveler. In other words, we can study this comet so well because

we have many different assets in different locations,

observing things in different wavelengths in different ways

with different instruments, each set of observations providing a different lens

for understanding objects in the sky. So NASA's science

team has kept watch on 3i Atlas for nearly its entire journey through

the solar system for the first time ever. So I'll just quickly go through

the timeline of which NASA spacecraft have observed the comet thus far,

and we're still going. There will be more opportunities to observe

this comet as it continues its journey through the solar system,

passing the orbit of Jupiter in spring

of 2026. So the NASA assets that are gathering

observations of 3I Atlas include Hubble, the James Webb

Space Telescope, TESS, Swift,

SphereX, Perseverance, Mars Rover,

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Maven, Europa Clipper,

Lucy, Psyche, personal favorite, Parker Solar

Probe, punch stereo, and ESA, NASA's SOHO mission.

And I'll note that Parker Solar Probe's data were just downloaded yesterday. And indeed we

did catch several glimpses of this amazing comet. The scientific community

is hard at work analyzing these images and

everyone, as always, is welcome to take a look at

NASA. We embrace open science. We make all of our data available to the

public 24, 7. And we invite, in fact, we really want you

to tell us what you're observing and what you think about

what we're looking at. We're still learning, even about what questions

we still need to ask. And this of course, is the scientific process

in action. All the data go to a public archive.

We get those images as soon as we're able to from all of our

eyes in space. As always, I am excited to see what

new things we learn about our friendly solar system visitor in the days and

in fact, the years to come. So now I'm going to pass over to Sean.

He's going to tell you about what our astrophysics missions have

seen. They of course, were some of the first things to look at the comet.

And images from several of them have been available since

the beginning of the summer. So I'm going to ask you to set the stage

for us, tell us what we've already seen before we hand over to Tom

to tell us all the new stuff. Take it away, Sean. Thanks Nikki. Happy to

to give you some background. NASA's astrophysics missions,

like all our missions, they are designed to do things that

would otherwise be impossible. In this case, our nation's space

telescopes stare deeper and more sharply into the universe than any other

observatories in the world. And that means we're often the first to follow up and

study near Earth objects or comets like 3i Atlas after

they're initially detected, that same powerful gaze that lets us, these telescopes,

see distant galaxies, those little red dots you might hear about.

They also allow us to observe details about objects like

3i Atlas a little bit sooner. And the earlier we learn

about these objects, the earlier we can share this information with the world,

including the science community and our partners across the planet that

often have ground based assets or other space based assets so that they can conduct

additional observations with their telescopes. In this

case, our astrophysics Missions came together to take advantage of this rare

opportunity to study this comet that came to us from outside the solar

system. From our flagship space telescopes to smaller missions like Tess

and Swift, they all have, as Nikki said, different complementary capabilities.

They don't just do things that would otherwise be impossible. They do things that

even our other great telescopes can't do. So every time we add to the fleet,

we add additional capabilities that expand the realm of the possible. In this case,

it let us refine the orbit of this structure early on, determine what

its structure is and what its composition is, what it is made of. It's a

beautiful illustration of why we have not just one space telescope, but a fleet of

them. Because every one member of that fleet specializes in a different kind of

information, contributing a different piece of the puzzle to the total understanding

we have from the fleet as a whole. So, for example,

old reliable NASA's Hubble Space Telescope celebrated

its 35th birthday earlier this year. And not too long after that,

in July, it looked at 3i Atlas not long after

we discovered it from the ground. At this point, 3i Atlas was about

277 million miles from Earth. And what

Hubble's images revealed was a few things. First, a teardrop shaped coma

of dust coming off that solid icy nucleus of

the comet itself. From these data, astronomers were able to

more accurately narrow a few things. Importantly, the size

of the nucleus. We now know it's between at that point. Actually,

we knew it was between 1400ft in diameter, up to as large as

3 1/2 miles in diameter. And Hubble also

saw that the comet was losing dust and not just losing it, but losing it

at a rate consistent with other previous sun bound comets that originated

from within our solar system, consistent with the physics that we figured out from watching

those objects. Now, the last thing Hubble did is it gave us

a better understanding of the orbit of this object, tell us not

just where it was, but where it was heading. So we could point other observatories

at it, such as the James Webb Space Telescope. We added this to our fleet

early in this decade. We didn't have it when the last two interstellar comets came

around. And what James Webb did and its companion Spherex, which we only launched

at the beginning of this year, is it added infrared observations.

The power of infrared observations is these are colors

we can't see. They're redder than what our eyes can detect. And infrared

light is particularly good at helping us understand the composition of objects. We can see

little molecular fingerprints from the things that the Objects are made of.

So with these infrared observations with James Webb and Spherex,

we detected an abundance of carbon dioxide gas in the comet's coma and

in the bright cloud of gas and dust surrounding that comet as it approaches the

sun. Those molecular fingerprints I mentioned, those are the little, like science wiggles

you might see in the top right of these images. We now know from seeing

those science wiggles, those fingerprints of those molecules, that the comet has a nucleus

rich in carbon dioxide, as well as the presence

of water ice. Now, the ratio, like we can not just say that these

things are there. We can also say, what's the ratio of carbon dioxide to water?

And we now know that. We know it's larger than what we

usually see in solar system objects, but there's a lot

of natural explanations for that. For one, the carbon dioxide is

going to kind of bake off that comet earlier on when it's far away.

But there's other well understood processes that could also explain it.

I'll just put this in context. There are every time we look beyond

our solar system and we look at the ratios of carbon dioxide to

water, we see, whether it's a star or a planet,

different ratios than we see in the solar system. And that's true for this comet

as well. So it could mean, this is the last theory

of why those ratios could be different, that these ices could have been exposed to

higher levels of radiation than comets in our own system. Or as I said before,

could be that the comet just formed from a region where carbon dioxide ice

was particularly abundant and different from our solar system.

Other missions, like our Swift spacecraft, which studies X rays and gamma

rays, have also observed the comet. Teams even look back through data from

our TESS mission, which was designed to look at exoplanets and found observations

of the comet as early as May. That information is helping us understand

the comet's history before it got closer and when those other observatories pointed

at it once we knew where it was. Now that the comet is near,

relatively speaking, our planetary and heliophysics missions have joined in

to tell us more. And now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague

Tom Statler to talk about some of those new images.

All right, thanks very much, Sean. Before we get

started, I just want to remind everybody of where we

are, who is where in this play.

As you saw in the animations while Nikki was speaking, the sun,

of course, is at the center of our solar system. The planets are orbiting around

the sun, and in this case, Comet 3i Atlas has come through

on a trajectory in the opposite direction and has

arrived at its closest point to the sun when the Earth was on

the wrong side for us to conveniently observe. But Mars

was on the correct side of the sun and our Mars assets were

able to observe the comet. And also several of our other spacecraft were on the

correct side of the Sun. So the scientific community is really excited about

the comet and about these new observations. I'm tremendously excited to help share

them with you today. This is a new scientific opportunity and it's a new window

into the makeups and histories of other solar systems. We're just beginning

to learn about these types of objects and figure out what are the right

questions we should ask about them. Now,

let me start by going directly

to what we were able to see at the beginning of September

when Psyche was able to see

the mission. So before that, though, in August,

we organized a workshop, we organized a coordination session for

the missions across the NASA fleet that had good opportunities for potentially

observing 3i atlas so that we could all share observing plans

and knew what was going to be possible with our assets.

I can't emphasize enough now how thanks to the

cooperation of so many mission teams, we will be accumulating a wealth

of data on this comet that the science community will be digging into for

years. Now, let's go back to September

and I can show you a sampling of the images collected by our different

mission teams to set the context. You're going to see a comet

that's a small body with a coma around it, basically a fuzzy blob.

Now remember, space is big. Nothing is ever really

as close as you like. And all of these observations are very, very difficult.

It's a little bit as if our NASA spacecraft were at a baseball

game or watching the game from different places. In the stadium, everybody's got

a camera and they're trying to get a picture of the ball. And nobody has

a perfect view and everybody has a different camera. Now let's

return to September and see the first images from the Psyche spacecraft.

NASA's Psyche mission acquired four broadband black and

white images of the comet over the course of eight hours on September 8th

and 9th, 2025. The comet was about 33 million

miles from the spacecraft at that time. And you can see in the image the

large frame where the comet was seen at different

times. Down in the bottom left is a blow up a stack.

In addition of all of those observations, the Psyche spacecraft

is on its way to an asteroid in the main asteroid belt that's also named

Psyche. And These images were the first captured from this perspective.

Now, if you think in that lower left, you're not seeing very much. Just wait

a minute. You'll see more now. The following week in September,

the Lucy spacecraft observed the comet from the

opposite direction. So let's take a look at the Lucy image. This is

another broadband black and white image made by adding up a series of

individual exposures that were taken on September 16th.

Lucy is on its way to study asteroids that shared Jupiter's

orbit around the sun, called the Trojan asteroids. Lucy was 240 million

miles away from 3i Atlas, which is circled in the center. When its high

resolution LORRI camera caught the comet. You can

see the comet's coma, the fuzzy halo of gas and dust surrounding 3i

Atlas and its tail, a smudge extending to the right of

the comet. If you were the Lucy spacecraft looking at the comet from this

angle, the sun would be a little bit over your left shoulder. And so

the comet tail is pointing away from the sun. And as we've seen many times

before in solar system comets, for scale, this image spans

about one third the width of the full moon. As you'd see it on

the sky, of course, at the distance of the comet, that's a much, much larger

region of space than the moon. Now, this looks a little different from the

PSYCHE image. Part of that is because the cameras are different, and part

is because of the ways the PSYCHE and the Lucy teams decided to show their

images. But also it's because we're seeing the comet from different directions.

Seeing a comet's coma in different lighting geometries with the

sun coming from different directions is one of the key ways to learn about

the physical properties of the dust that's been launched off its surface.

And I want to emphasize that you do not get these views unless you

have spacecraft farther from the sun than the comet is, so that

you can see it backlit. We could not get this view from

the vantage point of the Earth. So combining the data from Lucy,

Psyche and Earth based telescopes, scientists are hoping to better understand both

the three dimensional structure of the comet and the nature of the dust.

It's a rare opportunity to compare ancient dust

from a distant solar system to that from our own.

Now let's go to the next picture from the MAVEN spacecraft

at Mars. Beginning at the beginning of October,

3i Atlas passed within 20 million miles of Mars,

which gave our Mars spacecraft an opportunity for a close up.

And earlier you saw the image that Ahmed shared from our Mars

Reconnaissance Orbiter. Maven is another Mars Orbiter that has been studying

the Martian atmosphere since 2014.

Now, this picture is not a direct picture of

the comet itself. It's a spectrum. You're seeing the

science wiggles that Sean was just talking about. This is some of

those science wiggles where the instrument, the spectrograph, the ultraviolet spectrograph

on Maven, has looked at the comet and also split

up the ultraviolet light according to color. So you're seeing

three different bands in this image. On the right, you're seeing

emission from hydrogen gas in the atmosphere of Mars.

In the middle, there's a fainter band indicating that it's coming from

hydrogen gas in interplanetary space. And on the left,

that blob is the signature of hydrogen

gas coming from Comet 3I Atlas. It's a little blob

rather than a big streak because the comet is a small object

in the sky relative to great big gigantic Mars and interstellar space.

That fills the entire field of the instrument. That definitely

tells us, first of all, that the comet is there. If there were no comet,

there would be no little blob on the left side of the image.

But it's also telling us it's one of the many ways that we're able

to discern the chemical composition of 3i atlas.

And in this particular example, it's showing us the hydrogen gas that's coming

off of the nucleus. Now,

maven's observations, combined with the earlier observations by

Swift and Webb that Sean spoke about, will help determine the water production

rate, how much water vapor is released from the comet when the

comet is warmed by the sun, which provides insight into the formation of the comet

and its journey through our galaxy. Now, the European Space

agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory,

or SOHO, also successfully imaged 3i Atlas

from October 15 to 16 after it had passed

Mars. And SOHO spotted the comet crossing its field of view

from approximately 222 million miles away,

or more than twice the distance of Earth from the Sun.

Comet 3I Atlas was expected to be too faint for SOHO

to see, but this result was made using detailed image processing and

overlaying, or we call it stacking, subsequent telescope images.

This image highlights the value of spacecraft and instruments

designed to look directly toward the Sun. As Nikki was

saying before, not only to study the sun, but also to have

the ability to see other objects crossing, in this case, behind the

sun from the telescope's point of view, you'll be able to see the

rest of the images on our 3i Atlas.

Go.NASA.gov and

there will be more to come. Not all of the data have been downlinked yet

through NASA's Deep Space Network and there are more observations still in

work. And also it's a long way from where we are today,

seeing the initial images to then making sure that

they are accurately calibrated and processed to do science with and

then doing the analysis, combining the data sets of understanding

them and finally producing the scientific understanding, the knowledge of

what this all means, which will be published in peer reviewed

scientific journals. The answers will come later on.

We are still at this phase very much in the state where we're figuring

out what are even the right questions to ask about interstellar objects.

This is a snapshot of where we are very early in

the scientific process. Okay, back to you, Courtney. All right, thank you

all for your opening remarks. We'll go ahead and start the question and answer portion

of this event. Just a reminder to our media on the phone bridge to press

Star one to enter the queue and ask your questions. We'll take

our first question from the phone bridge from Marcia Dunn with the Associated Press.

Yes, hi. Based on your latest observation,

what more can you tell us about the potential shape of the comet?

Can you fine tune any more on how

big or small it might be, origin,

all that sort of thing? Thank you. Thanks for that question.

There's a lot of territory to cover there, so let's see what I can do.

The size of the nucleus still has yet to be

pinned down. The best data are still from the Hubble observations

that Sean was talking about. So we're still right

now in that range of somewhere in the vicinity of

a couple of thousand feet to a couple of miles diameter.

But we'll get better on that one. The shape of the

nucleus is also difficult to pin down because generally we're not resolving

it in our observations. It's obscured by the dust and especially it's

obscured by the reflected sunlight off of the dust in the

inner part of the coma. But what observers from the ground have been able

to do is observe the brightness of the center of the comet over

time to see if there's a modulation of that brightness.

That would be an indication of rotation. And it's very difficult

to discern. So what it's looking like so far is that

there's not a big the shape of the nucleus is not very far

from being round. It doesn't seem to be a big or at least we're not

seeing signatures of a very elongated object yet.

There's a lot still to come there I think you were also

talking about origin. It would be

great, it would be fabulous if we could trace back the

incoming trajectory into the solar system and trace that back and

figure out where it came from. But things are not quite so simple.

Our galaxy, as Sean knows, is a big and complicated place.

And the sun and all the other stars in our galaxy are in orbit around

the center of the galaxy. And so 3i

Atlas has been in interstellar space for a very long time. There is circumstantial

evidence, given how fast it has come in to

our solar system, that it came from some

very old population. A solar system around

a very old star. Quite possibly, we can't say this for sure,

but the likelihood is it came from a solar system older than

our own solar system itself. Which gives me goosebumps to think about,

frankly, because that means the 3i Atlas is not just

a window into another solar system, it's a window into

the deep past. And so deep in the past that it predates

even the formation of our Earth and our sun.

All right, we'll take our next question from the phone bridge from Bill Harwood

with cbs.

Bill, if you're talking, we can't hear you.

Tell me again. This is Bill Harwood again. Can you hear me? We have you

loud and clear. Okay, thanks. Sorry about that.

You know, I'm mentioning the rumors that were, you know, kind of scurrying around about

this thing in the weeks leading up to this briefing today. I have

two questions for anybody who care to answer. One is, did any of you seriously.

Did you take seriously the. The proposition from some that

this could be an alien spacecraft? I doubt you did, but I'm asking

the question anyway. And number two, is there any evidence you see in any

of the data you have that that would fit an explanation

like that, or as far as you're concerned, as all of this data say conclusively,

that this is simply a comet that happens to be passing through the solar

system? Thanks. So I'll take that one, Bill, and thanks for the question.

We love all of the different science and all of the

different kind of hypotheses into what these things can be. You know,

when you start seeing something, you just got to point. You know,

it's natural to wonder what it is. And we actually love,

as Almit said, we love that the world wandered along with us, and that's such

a cool thing. We certainly were able because of

the. The measurements that Sean described from the astrophysics

telescopes that immediately turned on, on this object once

we found it. And even, you know, I was interested. I just learned that we'd

actually gone back and actually seen it before we even found it. So that was

super cool. I just found, just heard that from Sean. But, you know, we,

we were very quickly able to look for sort of, you know, the easiest

thing to do, I'll put it a different way, is if you, if you understand

comets pretty well and you understand asteroids pretty well, you kind of know the signatures

that you're looking for. And so you can sort of look for those quickly and

tick them off and say, yep, it really does behave like a comet.

The interesting thing that, you know, Tom, I know if I give him,

if I throw it, throw this to him in a second, he's going to geek

out about it. But the, the really cool thing about this

is the differences because it comes from somewhere else and that's why

we're so excited about it. It's only the third time that we've been able to

identify and track something coming from outside our

own solar system. We've long predicted these things occur and now,

of course, we know better how to look for them. And we now have this

amazing ATLAS array. You know, we're expecting we'll find a lot more of them,

but it was quick. We were quick to be able to say, yep, it definitely

behaves like a comet. We certainly haven't seen any, any techno signatures

or anything from it that would lead us to believe it was anything other than

a comet. But the super cool thing is not that it's exactly like

all the comets that we see in our solar system. It's the differences that

are so tantalizing for us as we, we. And you know, it gives me goosebumps

too. It's, it could be from something that existed before our own solar system.

That is so cool. It's, it's from something that predates

even our own star. Yep, it's going

to look different because it didn't come from our solar system.

And that's what makes it so magical. You want to geek out a little bit.

You were geeking out so expertly, Nikki, to begin with.

Embrace. That was, that was fabulous. But that's exactly right. I mean,

objects from things from other places, we naturally expect them to

be different from our own homegrown variety. And I like to

imagine if you, you know, if you're fortunate enough to have grown up in Hawaii

and you only drank Kona coffee, you love your Kona coffee. And then somebody

says to you, well, gee, have you tried Sumatran? You're going to say,

well, do you expect it to be different? And they'll say, why don't you try

this? And you try it and you say, wow, that's really different. And you realize,

well, I expected this to be different because it was from someplace else. It was

a different environment in Sumatra. Now, does that, does that one sip of coffee

tell you everything about the weather in Sumatra and the soil and the

people who harvest the coffee, bless them?

Of course not. But it's, but it's different and yet it's still coffee.

And that's what we have in this case. We have a commentary body.

It behaves, it resembles the homegrown comets that we

have in our solar system, and yet it's excitingly different in particular ways.

It does the same thing comets do. Comets do. It evaporates

carbon dioxide gas, it evaporates water, but it's

evaporating more carbon dioxide compared to water. So that's a very interesting

thing. Comets evaporate dust and the dust is broken down,

the minerals are broken down by the ultraviolet light of the sun.

And comets, we know comets put out nickel,

they put out iron. That's what comets do. This particular one

is putting out more nickel than iron. That's really interesting,

really remarkable and something to be studied in the future.

So we're always interested in new ideas, we're always interested

in new suggestions. And all ideas are good when they're born.

But those that stand the test of time, those that stand, stand up to testing.

Those that are supported by the evidence are the ones that survive.

All right, we'll take our next question on the phone bridge.

And that one comes from Matthew Glasser with abc.

Good afternoon. Thank you for doing this. Tom mentioned that you

know, the answers will come in time. I'm curious about what are some of the

hopes that we might discover from this comment. What might it tell us about our

planet, about our solar system, about the, the universe? Are there key things you're

looking for as you start to analyze this data? And are you excited about anything

in particular when it comes to better understanding how things are working out there?

Sure, I can take that.

Every new object we discover is a new piece

in the puzzle. What we're trying to do always is to

understand the universe. That's part of the NASA mission, is to understand the solar

system, understand the universe, understand the origin of planets, the origin of life,

and that is a huge question. And we get little

bits, little clues to parts of that puzzle and we start trying to put that

puzzle together. We have gained tremendous Amount of information from

hundreds of years of astronomical observation and from decades of in

situ spacecraft observation has revealed our planet's as actual

places, not just points in the sky that you could barely see with your own

eyes. We've learned about comets and asteroids and we're beginning to put together

a picture of how those, how all of

those planet forming minerals and planet forming ices came together to

form our planets and how our solar system changed over time.

Just one example, we get a fascinating clue from

the objects like Pluto that we've been discovering

since the 1990s. The Trans Neptunian objects,

the way they are distributed through space in the outer solar system,

show us clues to how the orbits of the major planets may have

changed over time in the early solar system. A fascinating thing and

questions that we would never have thought to ask before we knew about these trans

Neptunian objects. Now, interstellar objects, like I said before,

are new windows, and it's windows that we've never even looked at out of before.

So what we're going to find is way too early to predict. But I think

we're getting a hint of the breadth,

the wide spectrum of conditions that existed in different parts

of the galaxy in different solar systems, where the compositions,

the elemental abundances, the mineral abundances may have been very,

very different. It would be a different picture if we were seeing the first three

interstellar objects and we'd say, gee, those look exactly like our homegrown comets.

That would have been really interesting. And we would have said, well,

maybe our galaxy is a boring place because every place is the same. What we're

seeing with this is not every place is the same. That's a good thing.

Lots of places to explore and they will be different if we ever manage

to get there. Yeah, I think of these as frozen fossils

from their moments of formation, including the things in and now

from beyond our solar system, or in some cases, we point our telescopes at

other debris disks, which is just, you know, a whole system full

of these small bodies. And so now what this will let us do is tell

that story in a broader context between the detailed and

large library of data we have on those origins

of our own solar system and how volatiles were delivered to make life possible here

on Earth, combined with that big picture of other systems,

of the dust spread throughout those other solar systems. And now with this

visitor that got frozen in time from somewhere beyond our

solar system, and that small picture of what that was like when that formed.

And the fact that, I mean, I love the sort of Thought of it as

that frozen fossil, almost frozen time capsule. We're kind of

privileged. I mean, it's come into our solar system, our sun.

We know, we think it hasn't seen a star for a long time.

So it's actually warming up and giving us more information.

It isn't just about a frozen object coming through and us sort

of saying, oh, look, there's a frozen object moving through. But as it's, it's almost

waking up and showing us its composition.

And that's allowing us to be able to do this great science. If it had

just remained frozen all the time, we wouldn't know much about it. But it is

the sort of its rendezvous with our star that is allowing us to

really do this amazing science. And that to me is it makes me feel

almost privileged to actually be able to unlock the secrets as

this cometary object is coming around

and rendezvousing and interacting with our solar

system. All right, let's head over to social media. Nina on

X asks, will it hit any planets in our solar system?

No, it will not. And you know, I think if

you, obviously we're not going to run it again, but please, you know, go,

go online, take a look at, at go to NASA.gov/3i-atlas

and take a look at the trajectory.

I kind of talk through it briefly. Tom, talk through it and

you can sort of see where those planets are. And remember this, even though

it's exciting and it's coming through space is huge, as both Sean

and Tom talked about. And so the probability of it actually hitting anything is

super, super small. You have to have all these things aligned to actually be able

to do it. But certainly the objects in our solar system will

be just fine. And we have another question from social media

from Astronomayam. They ask what makes Comet 3i

Atlas so different and intriguing compared to the other interstellar comets?

Tom, you want to it now the other, other other interstellar objects,

we say interstellar objects because not all of them were comets. So the first one

was discovered in 2017. That was one eye Oumuamua

that behaved very much like an asteroid.

Again, a little bit like 3i Atlas, a very interesting

asteroid in some ways different from the asteroids we're accustomed to seeing in our solar

system. For one thing, it seemed to be very, very elongated.

And while it was inactive, it seemed to be an inert,

mostly rocky object. It did show indirect

indications that it was evaporating gases in some way.

It wasn't around long enough for us to get really, really comprehensive

long duration observations and understand exactly

what it was doing. It was the very first one. We saw it for a

short time when it was on its way out, in fact, and so we didn't

get a great view of that. The second object,

two I Borisov discovered in 2019,

2019, behaved. It was a comet.

It was definitely a comet. It behaved in a lot of ways like our homegrown

solar system comets. In some, in many ways, like 3i

Atlas, its properties were more in

line with what we're used to seeing. And the comet

observers regarded it as very much akin to our solar system

comets, although in some ways a little bit at the edge of what

we're used to seeing. 3i Atlas is in a lot of ways like

2i Borisov, but a bit more out there

in terms of things like the carbon dioxide to water ratio.

All right, Svetlana on LinkedIn asks, will the observational data from

this campaign be available for open analysis?

Absolutely. Every piece of NASA data we

are delighted to share. We, we've had open data

policy at NASA for a long time. We, we make a big effort not just

to release the data, but also to make sure it's usable so you can get

the tools and things to actually analyze the data as well. And we invite

everybody to, to look at this comment with us if

you're able to take your own images through, like, citizen science programs.

We love that, too. We love everybody to be sharing in

the joy of NASA science as we take every opportunity to

take advantage of these incredible visitors to our solar system. And that citizen

science campaign that includes work that citizens help us

do to identify small bodies in our solar system. And so if you really want

to get engaged beyond just looking at the data, you can help us generate new

data and find other objects for us to study. Yep. The big, big one Solar

soho. Big, big comet finder, big comet tracker.

So many of those comets discovered by our citizen scientists. So keep

those, keep those observations coming. All right, we'll head back over

to the phone bridge. Our next question comes from Ken Chang with the New York

Times. Hi. Thank you.

This is for Tom and Nikki. One of

the measurements made so far. What is uniquely different about this

comment, other than the trajectory, of course, and two since

perihelion, it looks like it's, there are multiple jets. I was wondering if you could

talk about that and the speculation that it might have exploded. Thank you.

Go ahead. Yeah, thanks, Ken.

So some of the differences I already mentioned is the

ratio of the carbon dioxide to water ratio, the nickel to iron ratio.

Also there were ground based observations noting that the

polarization of the light reflected off the dust was

also unusual. So that's telling us some interesting things about the dust. There are

other indications that the physical properties of this dust,

maybe the grain size distribution, might be different

from the sorts of things that were used to. The appearance

of a sunward tail early on in the trajectory

was part of that, an indication that the dust was being pushed off the comet

on the sunward side and that it took a while for the solar radiation

pressure to push it back the other way. That's been seen before in other comets,

but not very often.

And I'm sorry Ken, what was the second part of the question?

Did it explode? The jets? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the jets.

Right. So seeing activity,

see more activity in the inner coma around the

nucleus right around the time of perihelion when it's being warmed most

intensely, is something that happens frequently. That's something the

comet observers are going to be very, very excited about. It does take some time

to figure out because it's time for the actual event that happens

on the surface to propagate out to a distance where you can see it with

a telescope. But people are going to be mapping what jets

there are. It doesn't necessarily mean there was an explosion.

Jets can also just mean there are particularly active areas

on the surface of the comet where more volatile

stuff is evaporating in that one spot than elsewhere and

jetting out. We saw this a decade ago with

the ESA Rosetta mission at

Comet 67P. It got up close and personal with

the nucleus and saw frequently that there were jets coming out from specific

places on the nucleus of the comet. So that could very

well be what's going on here. Can't tell for sure, but that's the sort of

thing we've seen before. The other thing I just want to say that we're expecting

to see as more stuff gets thrown off this combat

in these jets is at those warmer temperatures, additional things

can bake off of additional gases can bake off. And so we do expect the

composition to, of the, of the coma to potentially change or those jets to change

over time. And looking at the details of what other molecules we detect,

beyond the carbon dioxide and water we mentioned, is also going to be interesting especially

for that sort of like, like what was this, what was the area in this,

what was this stuff made of in the area it was made like long,

long time ago. Our next question is from David Chandler

with Sky and Telescope.

Yes, a couple of things.

Have you Any of these observations showing

you anything about any non gravitational accelerations

at this point. And also, can you say a little bit about coming attractions?

What observations are in the pipeline that have been made but not

released yet? I think the MRO high rise observations,

has that been released yet? And what else is there that's

either in the can and waiting to come out or observations

that will be made over the coming weeks as the object comes closer

to Earth? I can answer some of that about the non

gravitational accelerations. This is something that we look

very closely at for every comet because that's always something

that happens. And just to back up, to explain what the question is,

is that as comets evaporate, they are

blowing off gas, they are blowing off dust and everything. Every time

something gets pushed off the comet that acts like a little rocket

engine at that moment and pushes in the other. And so it's very, very common

to see comets have subtle changes in their

orbits as a result of these little rocket forces,

just called non gravitational accelerations. So this is being monitored very closely.

I spoke to our orbit determination team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

earlier this week and what they said is that this is being monitored.

There are some changes to the orbit,

but the uncertainties are still

fairly large. It's difficult because we can't see the nucleus directly.

It's difficult to get a very, very precise track on exactly where

it's going. But so far the non gravitational accelerations have been

very much on par with the sort that we see in solar. System comets in

terms of future observations. This is a situation where,

because this is only the third time we've had an opportunity to look at an

object like this, everyone that is in control of a telescope wants

to look at it because it's a fascinating and rare opportunity.

I know that our colleagues from the Keck Observatory have looked at it.

I believe that we're going to look at it again with JWST in December.

We have some other ground based facilities that are giving us additional compositional information

as those additional molecules bake off of 3i atlas.

Those are the things I'm aware of. There's probably a lot more that I'm not

because like I said, like every astronomer wants to get data on this thing because

it's such a rare opportunity. Yeah, and the, and the high rise image that you

asked about specifically, Ahmed kind of rolled that out at

the beginning. So please, please take a look at that image.

I think, you know, Sean is not bragging a lot on what these astrophysics

telescope. I don't why? But, you know, because we are able to look at it

in infrared with the James Webb Space Telescope. That will be the last time we

can see the comet. So as it is. As it is exiting the solar system

and getting further and further away, the James Webb Space Telescope will

actually be able to track it longer than anyone else, partly because it's of its

ability to kind of look long and deep rather

than sort of across and wide. And the fact that it looks in the ultraviolet,

so, sorry, in the infrared, so it can kind of see the dark objects.

And so I'm really excited about just sort of, you know, tracking it till the

very end. Also noted we're downlinking data from

missions. I mentioned Parker Solar Probe, because I just heard before we

came on that we've got some data and we'd seen the comet. I haven't had

time to look at the data yet, but all of those things are coming up

as we are getting, getting more and more data coming down to us from those

missions. And then as both Sean and Tom talked about just,

just really making sure we are sharpening up those images and, and really, you know,

making sure they're calibrated. Right now we're putting out almost the raw images. We're putting

out things quickly so everyone can see them, but we'll take some time and do

some, you know, real sort of deep looking into those and do some

more of the spectroscopy. Tom showed a really great example of kind of looking

through the atmosphere of Mars, taking a. Taking.

You take out that hydrogen, take out the hydrogen from our solar system,

and then let us look at the hydrogen that's coming from the comets. We'll be

doing a lot more of that as we move, move on to do great things

with NASA science. All right, that's a great lead. In to our next question on

social media, Elijah on X asks what kind of processing were the images

subjected to and why did they need it?

The, the. The images that were released received the

sort of standard processing that we do between the raw data that comes down

into a telescope that, as Nikki said, you know, we need

to make sure for scientific accuracy that they're calibrated against the other

observations and we account for anything that the telescope is doing

in that moment. And so that there's. It would be our standard set of calibrations

and normalizations for a object of this type,

which is to say a comet. I can add a little bit more to that.

Theas Nikki said our desire was to get these images out

to the public as quickly as possible. And so there are some

image artifacts in there that you'll see. And I can specifically, I can speak

to the Lucy image that you saw previously. If you look

at the comet, you'll see some blobs around the comet. Little blobs,

faint blobs around the comet are not real. It came from the fact that in

order to get this particular view, it was necessary. Since this

backlit view, the team had to turn the spacecraft to

face more toward the sun than it generally does.

And so that means some part of the spacecraft were in the sun

and some of that bright, you know, the sunlight reflected off parts of the spacecraft

got into the camera and that resulted in those little blobs.

So that's an example of processing that has yet to be done to

figure out exactly what that scattered light contribution was and

remove that from the image so that what we show in the image

is entirely what was there in the sky and not

something just made by sun glints off the spacecraft hardware.

Yeah, and sometimes I think you showed the SOHO image where we actually stacked

a couple of images, because a single image, you wouldn't be able to see

it. It would be too faint. But if we stack a couple of images

together, then you can actually start to really make out what that comet looks

like. Okay, next, Gail on Facebook asks,

how can an object like 3i atlas come from so far, moving as

fast as it is and not hit anything?

Orbital dynamics and space is really,

really huge. And so, you know, it's, it is

amazing to think about just how big the,

even our solar system. And so to give you the Voyager

spacecraft, Voyager 1 is now one light day away

from Earth, which means when we send a command or we send,

you know, a photon from Earth, it takes a full day for

that photon to arrive at Voyager. And Voyager is

only just outside kind of what we think of as the edge of our solar

system. And so space is vast. Yes,

yes, this thing is moving quickly. And yes, it came from outside our solar

system. But you know, it really, the probability of it actually hitting something is

so small, everything has to align. It's also not

quite in the ecliptic plane. It's not quite in like the, our normal.

If you think about sort of looking side on at our solar system with the

sun and then you put the planets kind of in a row. Normally everything sort

of orbits in this plane. This is slightly tilt tipped,

not unusual because it's not gravitationally bound to our sun,

but it's slightly tipped. That makes the probability of hitting it almost Even

greater if I can play. With a scale model solar system.

If you make a scale model solar system where the sun and the Earth are

one foot apart, that's about one foot. The sun is a P the

Earth, you need a magnifying glass to see. It's so small,

the entire solar system will just barely fit in your house if you

squeeze a little bit. And the next nearest star is over 50 miles

away. So they call it space for a reason.

Most of it is space. Okay,

we'll head back to our phone bridge. Our next question is from Brandon

Spector with Live Science.

Hi, I wanted to ask about the age of laconic. You mentioned

there's circumstantial evidence that it's much older than our solar system.

But how can we constrain that age a little more?

And what will that tell us if it is indeed much, much older than the

solar system? I can start that, but I'm going to pass it

to Sean to talk about ages in the galaxy. Okay, so cutting

to the end, the bottom line is going to be it's probably going to be

really hard to get a more precise figure from one object. I think we what

we're looking at in the future as we

discover more of these, when we get to the point where we have maybe a

few dozen of them and look at the distribution properties, we may be able to

get a better handle on what the distribution of ages is.

So what's going on here is that it

takes the sun 240 million years to orbit around

the center of the galaxy, and we're doing that with a neighborhood of,

of stars. So we're all going around the center of the galaxy.

The relative motions between stars in our solar

neighborhood is sort of 10 ish 15. And sorry, I have

all these numbers in my head in metric because that's the way I learned them.

But 10 or 15ish kilometers per second. So what is that? That's about

25,000 miles an hour, I think.

And 3i Atlas is coming through at a speed of 60 something kilometers

per second. So that's three times faster than the average

of our local neighborhoods, which is telling us

that it's coming from a different population from what

we have generally around us Now. Sean will be able to clarify the age dispersion

relation in our galaxy, which tells us, which has been discovered

over the last century studying stars in the galaxy,

that the relative speeds of stars is an

indicator of age. Stars that formed older in our

galaxy over time increase their random motions for reasons

that Sean will explain. And so that's

the circumstantial evidence that makes us think that 3i Atlas

came from a solar system that had

larger motions relative to our solar neighborhood and is

older. But it is a circumstantial and probabilistic argument. So I'm just going

to take this opportunity to brag about our telescopes and the James Webb Space Telescope

in particular. This blows my mind. We have data from

galaxies closer to the origin of the universe than

we have data from rocks closer to the origin of Earth. Right. In other words,

like, if you pick up the oldest rock that we have from Earth, it is

further away from the origin of Earth in terms of, of hundreds of millions of

years than the amount of time there was between the origin of the

universe and the earliest galaxies that JWST has now observed. And that's part of the

story of how well we understand not just the history of our home planet,

but the history of the entire universe that it's a part of. And now this

is just another part of that story of the local neighborhood that our solar system

is a part of. All right, our last question

for today comes from X and asks, if we can see grains

of sand on Mars, how is the clearest photo we can see

for three I Atlas what we've seen?

So because we're closer to the grains of sands on Mars. Right.

And so, like, this is like, JWST can only get,

like, these single pixel blobs of the faintest galaxies,

the furthest away galaxies in our universe. And because three Atlases in our solar

system, we can get the images and the compositional information with jwst, as it got

closer to some of our, the planetary spacecraft Tom was talking about,

they can't even see these galaxies. But because 3i Atlas was closer to them than

they were to JW, they got really good images of the object as it

passed by. Right. As you said, we can image individual grains on Mars

because we have spacecraft standing on Mars. But even our closest

spacecraft to 3i Atlas were still 19 million miles away.

And it's going too fast for us to send something there to, like, you know,

intercept and get that close to it. So that's just not that we just don't

have. If we, if we could, we would like, we would be there

up close and getting those grains. All right, well, that's all the time we

have for today. Thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to follow

along with NASA as we continue to observe 3i Atlas.

Find new images, detailed information and resources by

visiting go NASA and

by following NASA Solar System on social media. Thanks for joining.

Sam.

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¿Nave alienígena o cometa de 7.000 millones de años? Las 20 misiones de la NASA que resolvieron el misterio del 3I/ATLAS

Name: NASA Shares Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Images
Uploaded: 2025-11-20T15:31:00.000Z
Description: ¿Nave extraterrestre o cometa? La NASA desvela las imágenes del misterioso 3I/ATLAS, el visitante interestelar más antiguo que el Sol. Descubre cómo 20 misiones espaciales capturaron este objeto desde Marte, Hubble y James Webb. Datos, composición química y fotos exclusivas

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¿Nave extraterrestre o cometa? La NASA desvela las imágenes del misterioso 3I/ATLAS, el visitante interestelar más antiguo que el Sol. Descubre cómo 20 misiones espaciales capturaron este objeto desde Marte, Hubble y James Webb. Datos, composición química y fotos exclusivas

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