NASA Releases Images of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

NASA released new images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on Wednesday during a live briefing from its Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, offering the public a detailed view of the rare visitor from beyond the solar system. The event, held at 3 p.m. EST and broadcast on NASA's website and YouTube channel, featured observations captured by multiple spacecraft and ground-based telescopes as the comet made a close pass by Mars last month.

Discovered on July 1, 2025, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope, 3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object to enter the solar system, following 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019. Unlike comets originating from the distant Oort Cloud, this object formed around another star and has been traveling through interstellar space for potentially billions of years before arriving here. It reached its closest point to the sun, known as perihelion, on October 30, 2025, at a distance of about 130 million miles, and is now on a hyperbolic trajectory that will carry it out of the solar system permanently after a flyby of Jupiter in March 2026.

The images, delayed by the U.S. government...