NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
It may be time to dust off those tin-foil hats again ,,,,
3I/ATLAS is an interstellar comet discovered on 1st July 2025 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System at Rio Hurtado in Chile. It has been designated as interstellar, in other words from outside our Solar System, because of its speed and trajectory.
It seems to be called 3I because there was a 2I/Borisov back in 2019, another visitor from outside our Solar System and it was discovered by an amateur named Gennady Borisov.. That means the first digit must be the sequence number and after the / is the name of the discoverer,
Where was the first one you wonder, well that was 1I/Oumuamua discovered in 2017. It was observed by a Canadian using a telescope in an observatory in Hawaii hence the Hawaiian name. There was much conjecture over the meaning of this first appearance of an interstellar object but it has all been superseded by two more interstellar objects. The boffins have calculated this first one’s distance from our sun over a period of time. In 1606 it was 2300 Astronomical Units from the sun and in 2429 it will again be 2300 Astronomical Units from the sun.
The first obvious place to look for information is NASA, also widely known as “Never A Straight Answer”. They describe the latest visitor as an interstellar comet, it is not an asteroid because they travel much more slowly. NASA claims it has a teardrop shaped cocoon of dust coming off its solid, icy nucleus. The images they display were taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. They say it is relatively faint and will not be visible from earth using the naked eye. It will be much closer to Mars than the earth as it passes by.
A swift glance at the European Space Agency’s website gives further confirmation that 3I/ATLAS is indeed an interstellar comet. There is yet more confirmation that this comet is no danger to us. It gets no closer than 240 million km and at its closest it will be on the other side of the sun. They say it has just gone behind the sun and will not reappear until late November.
As is often, if not always, the case with such things (remember excitement over the Hale-Bopp comet crashing into Jupiter in 1997) there has been much speculation about this comet with many saying it is not a comet but a spacecraft. There is not enough time to launch anything to intercept this comet, it will be far away by the time anything we can throw at it would arrive so telescopes and sensors it is.
It will pass much closer to Mars, about 30 million km away, than our lovely world and I remember one tweet a while back claiming this was a spacecraft and it is going to visit Mars and start terraforming the planet. Whoever came out with that has a wild imagination and could easily be sectioned.
Since the US government has been defunded NASA is not making any updates to any of its websites and this has fired the imaginations of many a conspiracy theorist. Their conjectures are in overdrive and seem to have decided that the whole government shutdown is connected with covering up any more details of this comet and nothing else.
Be that as it may, there are some fairly long tweets on X along the lines of a number of agencies are observing this comet and they have all gone quiet at the same time, even the Chinese who generally have more to say than the others.
The comet was closest to Mars on October 2nd or 3rd when it was being observed from Mars by all and sundry including NASA, ESA, the UAE and China. There has been no release of any images of this event. OK NASA is shut down but the others aren’t and they haven’t even issued a statement. The more excitable of people discussing this have decided that all these agencies saw something that needs a coordinated response and that means it is not actually a comet. Make of that what you will, my reaction is they are clutching at straws.
There have also been tweets that the chemical composition of the comet and its trail are completely abnormal and even wilder that this object is cigar shaped, about the size of Manhattan and has windows and lights in them. Someone has better eyes than me. So many have decided we are about to have first contact you could be forgiven for starting to waver.
We all know that these AI companies trawl the internet for as much data as they can gather. They then use this data to reach their decisions. How on earth are they going to make sense of all this. We, as mere mortals, can use our common sense to believe or not but these AI systems lack the common sense that you can have as a sentient being. Accidentally on purpose I did not use any AI to check out 3I/ATLAS, my credulity has been stretched quite far enough and it is time for me to lie down in a dark room.
The most humorous tweet I found was one of an imagined conversation between aliens and us.
Aliens: Earthlings we have killed your leaders, destroyed your economy and are here to take over your government.
Humans: Oh thank [expletive deleted] God
Aliens: Wait , what ?
© well_chuffed 2025
