During my recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan (accessible here ), I had mentioned the unfortunate circumstances, under which NASA had not released for four weeks the images collected by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images were taken on October 2 3, 2025, when the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS passed within 30 million kilometers from Mars. The images are extremely valuable scientifically because they possess a spatial resolution of 30 kilometers per pixel, about 3 times better than the spatial resolution achieved in the best publicly available image from the Hubble Space Telescope, taken on July 21, 2025 (accessible here and analyzed here). Whereas the Hubble image was taken from an edge-on perspective since Earth and the Sun were separated by only ~10 degrees relative to distant 3I/ATLAS, the HiRISE image offers a sideways perspective, valuable in decoding the mass loss geometry and glow around as it approached the Sun.

The delay in the data release was argued to be the result of the government shutdown on October 1, 2025. Nevertheless, conspiracy theorists suggested that it may have to do with evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence in the HiRISE images. When asked about it, I suggested that the delay is probably not a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence but rather of terrestrial stupidity. We should not hold science hostage to the shutdown politics of the day. The scientific community would have greatly benefited from the dissemination of this time-sensitive data as astronomers plan follow-up observations in the coming months.

Joe Rogan suggested that I contact the interim NASA administrator, Sean Duffy. The following day, I corresponded with congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna regarding a related formal request from NASA. Following our exchange, Representative Luna wrote a brilliant letter to NASA's acting administrator Duffy.

We all owe a debt of deep gratitude for the visionary support displayed by Representative Luna to frontier science through her letter, attached below.

Originally Posted By castlebravo84:


Maybe not on our planet or in our solar system, but this thing is from outside our solar system, and it is only the third interstellar body we have been able to observe this closely, so we really have no clue what is and isn't "normal" for something like this.

Originally Posted By tnriverluver:
For reasons I won't go into on this board I tend to believe what's being channeled here.  I guess we will find out one way or the other.  All I do know for certain is this is an object we have never seen before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWy1k_4EQcM

And then there is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUWf4Z3L41I

Originally Posted By macman37:


Without saying your reasons, what are the messages being channeled that you find believable? (Or perhaps just a synopsis of the video)

On November 5, 2025, two new images of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS were released. They show a compact source of light without a clear cometary tail. The coma is not very different in morphology than its appearance in the Hubble Space Telescope on July 21, 2025.





This is surprising in view of NASA's JPL report here of a non-gravitational acceleration   normalized at a heliocentric value of 1 au:

1. A radial acceleration away from the Sun of 1.1x10^{-6} au per day squared.

2. A transverse acceleration relative to the Sun's direction of 3.7x10^{-7} au per day squared.

Based on momentum conservation (as discussed here), I derived here that the mass fraction lost during the perihelion passage of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 13%. For a typical comet, this should have resulted in a massive coma with dust and gas that would have been pushed by the solar radiation pressure and the solar wind to the shape of a typical cometary tail pointing away from the Sun. No such tail is visible in the new images from November 5, 2025.

In comparison, I include below an image of the solar system's comet Lemmon, taken by one of the telescopes that observed 3I/ATLAS two days ago. Lemmon features a clear cometary tail pointing away from the Sun, as expected.

The anomalies displayed so far by 3I/ATLAS include:

1. Its retrograde trajectory is aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun, with a likelihood of 0.2%.

2. During July and August 2025, it displayed a sunward jet (anti-tail) that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets (see here).

3. Its nucleus is about a million times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua and a thousand times more massive than 2I/Borisov, while moving faster than both, altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1%.

4. Its arrival time was fine-tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter and be unobservable from Earth at perihelion, with a likelihood of 0.005%.

5. Its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron (as found in industrially-produced nickel alloys) and a nickel to cyanide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, including 2I/Borisov, with a likelihood below 1%.

6. Its gas plume contains only 4% water by mass, a primary constituent of familiar comets.

7. It shows extreme negative polarization, unprecedented for all known comets, including 2I/Borisov, with a likelihood below 1%.

8. It arrived from a direction coincident with the radio "Wow! Signal" to within 9 degrees, with a likelihood of 0.6%.

9. Near perihelion, it brightened faster than any known comet and was bluer than the Sun.

10. It exhibits non-gravitational acceleration which requires massive evaporation of at least 13%of its mass (as calculated here), but preliminary post-perihelion images do not show evidence for it so far.

Originally Posted By tnriverluver:
This showed up on Reddit this morning.  3I/Atlas is 7 billion years old!  ??????????

From the James Webb telescope

The problem now is that there is so much AI generated content it's becoming very difficult to know what to believe about anything anymore.

Originally Posted By SIMJEDI:

Just had a good conversation with @NASA regarding 3I/Atlas. As soon as the government reopens, they’ll be releasing images/data. Unfortunately, due to beaucratic reasons they cannot until then. Dr. Avi Loeb @GalileoProject1 (@Harvard) was correct in his early analysis of the…

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna  (@RepLuna) November 5, 2025

Originally Posted By tnriverluver:
What do y'all think the odds are of NASA coming clean on this once the shutdown ends.  I'm saying 0-10%.

Originally Posted By mhbaker81:
What's the deal with this new V1 BORISOV object that is inbetween 3I/ATLAS and Earth and supposedly headed our way? Haven't heard much about it, other than this video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uXFELv_EbQ

This morning, at 4.10 Universal Time (UT) on November 8, 2025, the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS showed a complex jet structure. M. J ger, G. Rhemann and E. Prosperi observed 3I/ATLAS at 29 degrees separation from the Sun in the sky, as reported here.

The stacked images, constituting 24 exposures in the green filter  each lasting 35 seconds , 2 exposures in a red filter and 2 exposures in a blue filter, show a large glowing halo extending out to half a million kilometers (5 arcminutes). The images show at least 7 distinct jets, some of which are anti-tails in the sunward direction.

The stacked images, constituting 24 exposures in the green filter  each lasting 35 seconds , 2 exposures in a red filter and 2 exposures in a blue filter, show a large glowing halo extending out to half a million kilometers (5 arcminutes). The images show at least 7 distinct jets, some of which are anti-tails in the sunward direction.

Given that a large number of jets appear in many directions, the reported non-gravitational acceleration of 3I/ATLAS (as discussed here) requires much more than 10 20% of its initial mass to have been ejected near perihelion. Only a fraction of that mass carries an excess momentum in a preferred direction. This means that the cloud of debris around 3I/ATLAS must represent a substantial fraction of its initial mass for a natural comet. However, technological thrusters could give the object a boost with much less mass jetted out at a higher speed.

At the time of observations, 3I/ATLAS was 7 10 degrees above the horizon. Eventually, twilight interfered with the observations, which took place under a bright moonlight.

Is the network of jets associated with pockets of ice on the surface of a natural cometary nucleus or are they coming from a set of jet thrusters used for navigation of a spacecraft? We do not know.

For now, let us enjoy the view. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Stacked RGB images of 3I/ATLAS at 4.10 UT on November 8, 2025. The sunward direction (ooposite to the arrow in the top panel) is pointing towards the bottom left corner. (Credit: M. J ger, G. Rhemann, E. Prosperi)

Originally Posted By SIMJEDI:
So now it has 5 jets, along with still not having a definitive tail.

A Complex Jet Structure Emanates from 3I/ATLAS After Perihelion:



https://i.imgur.com/6Omx7qq.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/nh3yPQ5.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/7I8K2zP.jpeg

Interstellar Comet 3I Atlas at 09.11.2025 shows nice tail structures Despite interference from moonlight (82 % illuminated) and a small height of around 9 to 12 degrees a try on comet 3I Atlas. The picture is heavily processed to show the antitail and the "smoking" tail. Combination of a picture series with 2 telescopes, piggyback mounted and tracked on comet: TEC 140 at f5 and ASI 6200MM, 5x180s L Askar 300

Today, a magnificent large-scale image of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, was reported here by Frank Niebling and Michael Buchner. The stacked image combines a series of 5 exposures, each lasting 3 minutes, from two telescopes (TEC 140/f5 and ASI 6200MM) between 5:08–5:23 UT on November 9, 2025.

The image shows two anti-tail jets out to 10 arcminutes towards the Sun accompanied by a longer collimated jet, extending away from the Sun out to an angular separation of 30 arcminutes, roughly the diameter of the Sun or the Moon.

At the current distance of 3I/ATLAS from Earth, 326 million kilometers, these angular extents correspond to spatial sizes of 0.95 million kilometers for the sunward anti-tail jets and 2.85 million kilometers for the tail jet away from the Sun. This enormous spatial scale is three orders of magnitude larger than the scale of the glowing halo around 3I/ATLAS in the Hubble Space Telescope image from July 21, 2025 (reported here).

This multi-jet structure constitutes a remarkable target for future observations with the Hubble and Webb telescopes, as 3I/ATLAS will arrive at closest approach to Earth on December 19, 2025. Its minimal distance from Earth will be 269 million kilometers, about a hundred times larger than the extent of the jet structure in today’s images. It is therefore unlikely that particle probes on Earth-based satellites will be able to capture particles from these jets. The same holds for the particle detectors on NASA’s Juno spacecraft around Jupiter (discussed here), which will probe 3I/ATLAS on March 16, 2026 from a distance of 53 million kilometers, an order of magnitude larger than the extent of the current jet structure. Similarly, ESA’s Juice spacecraft on its way to Jupiter (discussed here), is currently 64 million kilometers from 3I/ATLAS and unable to intercept these jets.

For a natural comet, the outflow velocity of the jets is expected to be merely 0.4 kilometers per second, of order the sound speed of gas at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun. In order for the jets to extend over the observed scales, they should have been ejected for timescales of 3 months for the tail and 1 month for the anti-tail.

Given that the anti-tail jets are only stopped at a distance of ~1 million kilometers implies that their ram-pressure exceeds that of the solar wind out to that distance. The solar wind is flowing at a speed of about 400 kilometers per second, which is a thousand times larger than the outflow speed from a natural comet. Since ram-pressure scales as speed squared, this means that the outermost mass density in the anti-tail is a million times bigger than that of the solar wind — a few proton masses per cubic centimeters. The outermost mass density of the jet gives a mass flux of 2 million kilograms per second per million-kilometer square. Summing over an area of order 10 million-kilometer squared, yields a mass loss rate of 50 billion tons per month. This mass is comparable to the minimum mass associated with 3I/ATLAS, 33 billion tons, that I calculated here from the lack of non-gravitational acceleration in the months preceding October 2025. Assuming a solid density of 0.5 grams per cubic centimeters, this means that the diameter of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 5 kilometers. If it is a natural comet and most of its nucleus survived perihelion, then the diameter of 3I/ATLAS should be 10 kilometers or larger.

This raises the first and most important anomaly that I pointed out in my first paper on 3I/ATLAS, published here. The inferred mass of over 50 billion tons is at least a million times more than the inferred mass of 1I/`Oumuamua. Why were we so fortunate to receive such a giant object as the third in the list of interstellar objects before witnessing a million objects of the size of 1I/`Oumuamua? As I showed in my paper, there is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to accommodate the delivery of such a giant icy rock to the inner solar system over our survey period of a decade. We would expect an object with a diameter above 10 kilometers to be delivered to our vicinity once per ten thousand years or longer. This anomaly has a likelihood of less than 0.1% if all rocky materials are packaged in large bodies of this size or less than 0.0005% if there is equal amount of total mass per logarithmic package mass interval. Combine that with the 0.2% probability of the retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS being aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane, and you get a chance of one in a hundred million for 3I/ATLAS to originate at random as a natural comet from interstellar space.

If, however, we consider the possibility that the jets emanating from 3I/ATLAS are associated with technological thrusters, then the required mass loss can be 1–2 orders of magnitude smaller with human-made technologies. Chemical rockets are propelled by an exhaust speed of 3–5 kilometers per second, which is ten times larger than the maximum ejection speed of volatiles sublimated by sunlight from cometary surfaces. Ion thrusters reach an even higher ejection speed of 10–50 kilometers per second. Furthermore, alien technology might employ thruster with yet higher speeds, reducing the required mass loss by more than 2 orders of magnitude and making the required fuel less than a percent of the mass of the spacecraft.

Given these considerations, is 3I/ATLAS of natural or technological origin?

Upcoming spectroscopic observations will allow us to determine the velocity, mass flux and composition of its jets and hence answer this foundational question.

The foundation of pioneering scientific research is the humility to learn rather than the arrogance of expertise.

Let me start this quantitative discussion with the conservative assumption that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is a natural comet, and work out its properties based on its latest post-perihelion image.

The large-scale image of 3I/ATLAS reported here on November 9, 2029 shows multiple jets reaching out to ~1 million kilometers towards the Sun and ~3 million kilometers in the opposite direction, as discussed here.

For a natural comet, the outflow velocity of the jets is expected to be 0.4 kilometers per second, of order the sound speed of gas at the distance of 3I/ATLAS from the Sun. At that speed, the jets must have persisted over a timescale of 1 3 months.

Given that the jets towards the Sun were stopped by the solar wind at a distance of a million kilometers, I calculated here that their mass density is a few million proton masses per cubic centimeter at a distance of a million kilometers from 3I/ATLAS. The product of this mass density and the outflow speed, implies a mass flux of 5 billion tons per month per area of a million-kilometer on a side. I calculated here that the total mass associated with 3I/ATLAS is at least 33 billion tons based on its early dynamics. Adopting an outer surface area for the jetted material of order a million-kilometer squared, I find that 3I/ATLAS may have lost ~16% of its mass. This is consistent with the mass fraction required by its non-gravitational acceleration at perihelion, as I calculated here.

Are these numbers consistent with the energy provided to 3I/ATLAS by the Sun?

The sublimation of carbon dioxide (CO2) ice requires 600 Joules per gram, nearly 5 times less than the sublimation of water (H2O) ice which is 2,835 Joules per gram. The Webb telescope spectroscopic data (reported here) indicated that when 3I/ATLAS was 2.4 times farther from the Sun than its perihelion distance, 87% of the mass of gas around it was CO2. In order to supply 5 billion tons of CO2 over the perihelion passage period of a month, 3I/ATLAS must have received at least 3x10^{18} Joules to sublimate this much CO2 mass. At its perihelion distance, the Sun provided 700 Joules per square meter per second. This means that the absorbing area of 3I/ATLAS must have been larger than 1,600 square kilometers. This is the area of a sphere with a diameter of 23 kilometers, 4 times larger than the maximum diameter of 5.6 kilometers inferred for 3I/ATLAS from the imaging data of the Hubble Space telescope (reported here). The required diameter is 51 kilometers for water ice.

"Houston, we have a problem" with the natural comet hypothesis! The required surface area of 3I/ATLAS to provide the inferred mass loss from the latest post-perihelion image, is at least 16 times larger than the upper limit derived here from its Hubble image on July 21, 2025.

When the Webb data was taken on August 6, 2025, 3I/ATLAS lost only 150 kilograms per second. The mass loss at perihelion derived above is 4 orders of magnitude larger, about 2 million kilograms per second. This is a dramatic increase, requiring a power-law dependence of mass loss on distance from the Sun with a power-law index of -10.5, consistent with the rapid perihelion brightening of 3I/ATLAS reported here.

Was the dramatic mass loss and brightening of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion evidence that it disintegrated? Breakup into fragments would have increased the surface area of its material. Since the surface-to-mass ratio scales inversely with the characteristic radius of fragments, an increase in surface area by a minimum factor of 16 requires that 3I/ATLAS broke into at least 16 equal pieces, and likely many more. This would mean that 3I/ATLAS exploded at perihelion and we are witnessing the resulting fireworks. In other words, the latest image implies that 3I/ATLAS was decimated by heating from the Sun if it is a natural comet.

The tidal force of the Sun is expected to separate the fragments in the coming weeks, creating an appearance similar to that of the comet Shoemaker-Levi 9 in 1994 near Jupiter. I discussed this possible outcome a month ago here.

However, if upcoming observations would reveal that 3I/ATLAS was not decimated by the Sun and maintained its integrity as a single body, then we will have to consider that it is something other than a natural comet. On December 19, 2025, 3I/ATLAS will get closest to Earth, allowing ground-based telescopes as well as the Hubble and Webb space telescope to diagnose its integrity.

Separately from the required breakup for a natural comet, the large diameter of 3I/ATLAS highlights the first anomaly that I pointed out in my first paper on 3I/ATLAS, published here. The inferred mass of 3I/ATLAS is over a million times more than the inferred mass of 1I/`Oumuamua. Why had we found such a giant object before witnessing a million objects of the size of 1I/`Oumuamua? As I showed in my paper, there is not enough rocky material in interstellar space to accommodate the delivery of such a giant icy rock to the inner solar system over our survey period of a decade. We would expect an object with a diameter above 10 kilometers to be delivered to our vicinity once per ten thousand years or longer. This anomaly has a likelihood of less than 0.1% if all rocky materials are packaged in large bodies of 3I/ATLAS' size or less than 0.0005% if there is equal amount of total mass per logarithmic package mass interval. Combine that with the 0.2% probability of the retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS being aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane, and you get a chance of one in a hundred million for 3I/ATLAS to originate from a familiar astrophysical origin.

Technological thrusters require a much smaller mass loss in order to produce the observed jets around 3I/ATLAS. Chemical rockets are propelled by an exhaust speed of 3 5 kilometers per second, which is ten times larger than the maximum ejection speed of volatiles sublimated by sunlight from natural cometary surfaces. Ion thrusters reach an even higher ejection speed of 10 50 kilometers per second. Alien-tech thrusters might employ yet higher exhaust speeds, reducing the required mass loss by several orders of magnitude and making the required fuel a small of the spacecraft mass. Upcoming spectroscopic observations will determine the velocity, mass flux and composition of the jets of 3I/ATLAS. Stay curious!

Originally Posted By sq40:
Reddit has this as a “leaked” image. But could easily be fake.

https://www.ar15.com/media/mediaFiles/49447/IMG_2230_jpeg-3657407.JPG

Images from the Nordic Optical Telescope on UT 2025 November 11 show that 3I/ATLAS continues as an active, single body, with no evidence for breakup following the recent perihelion passage. Asymmetries in the coma project to position angles 106+/-10 degrees and 301+/-1 degrees. The former is close to the projected orbit (110 degrees) and sunward direction (115 degrees), suggesting that it is the sunward fan observed on the inbound leg of the orbit and consisting of large and slowly launched particles projected sunward by dayside sublimation (c.f. 2025 Ap. J. Letters, 994 L3). The latter is close to the projected antisolar direction (295 degrees) on this date, identifying it as a normal dust tail. Plasma structures evident in recent wide field pictures taken by others are not evident in our data presumably because we used an R filter to isolate the dust, so excluding most gaseous emission lines. The heliocentric, geocentric distances and phase angle on UT 2025 November 11 were 1.43 au, 2.16 au and 22 degrees, respectively. Linked images show 3I/ATLAS with North to the top, East to the left, and a region approximately 0.5 million km wide. The projected antisolar direction (-S) and negative heliocentric velocity vector (-V) are marked. The diffuse object to the upper left of 3I is a galaxy. Other discrete objects are stars. The images are 1) linear stretch 2) contoured 3) color contoured 4) spatially filtered within a 0.13 million km radius region by subtracting the median signal in concentric annuli centered on the brightest pixel. The faint diagonal line from upper left to lower right is an "Elon".

Originally Posted By tnriverluver:
OK NASA the shutdown is officially over as of late yesterday.  Where the fuck are you???

Originally Posted By sq40:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdHtnuxU6gU

Originally Posted By macman37:
Is Medium a trustworthy news source? I have no idea. But here is an interesting article on a "...comprehensive planetary defense architecture"

So, I'll jump into this deeper later, I have to run but found this and thought it was interesting enough to bring up.

Originally Posted By Cypher214:
I saw that pop up on UFO Reddit.  Not sure about the validity or why the government would want to keep it classified but having a detection network positioned far out in the solar system to alert of possible impacts just seems like something we SHOULD have.

3I/ATLAS [C/2025 N1 (ATLAS)]
2025-11-16 11:53:50~12:23:20 UTC
New Mexico, USA
I captured the interstellar comet early this morning as a thin crescent moon passed immediately next to it. Still was able to capture three separate jets of ionic tail, and an anti tail? Or the dust tail?
The comet was also passing by the galaxy NGC4691, which really gave the impression of the object being from another world.
Image Train: Celestron EdgeHD800 + Celestron 0.7  reducer + Touptek ATR2600C
Subframes: 24 60s exposures
Date/Time: 2025-11-16 11:53:50~12:23:20 UTC
Location: {"message":"DEPRECATED_ENDPOINT"}
Comet stacked at the location of the first frame.

[Edit] I'd gotten in the habit of horizontally flipping my EdgeHD images because I'd been shooting HyperStar for several months. Just realized the mistake, fixed it  

Scheduled for Nov 19, 2025 | 3:00pm
Tune in as NASA shares the latest images of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, collected by several NASA missions.

First observed earlier this year, the 3I/ATLAS comet is only the third object ever identified as entering our solar system from elsewhere in the galaxy. While it poses no threat to Earth and will get no closer than 170 million miles to Earth, the comet flew within 19 million miles of Mars in early October.

Participants in this live event will include:
- NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
- Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate
- Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director, Astrophysics Division
- Tom Statler, lead scientist for solar system small bodies

Spacecraft across the solar system, as well as ground-based observatories, have been able to observe 3I/ATLAS as it passes through our celestial neighborhood and study how the comet behaves.

Share your questions for our experts in the live YouTube chat, or post them to other social platforms using the hashtag #AskNASA.

Learn more about the 3I/ATLAS comet: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/

Credit: NASA

Originally Posted By SIMJEDI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A55SUq2eDXg

Originally Posted By tnriverluver:

Hmmm I find that a bit disturbing/unsettling.   Stefan will also be on it with his channel allowing chat where NASA will not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iImFtQ-_v8