destroyed right in front of their faces.
They are so on the defensive.
Or they (NASA)
wouldn't have had this
"event" today.
Honey said:
"They didn't tell you anything
that you didn't already know."
To which I added:
"And they specify left out,
what they didn't want you to know."
A rich man
doesn't have to prove to you
he is rich.
He already knows it
so it's a waste of his time.
Just keep it in mind.
To talk about science. >> Good afternoon,
and welcome to NASA's Goddard Space Flight
1:24
Center. We are live today with NASA experts
who are excited to share the latest images we have
of the interstellar Comet three I. Atlas
three I means third interstellar and Atlas refers
to the NASA funded Atlas Survey telescope which made the discovery. We are joined today
by Amit Satriya, NASA's associate administrator.
Nikki Fox, associate administrator
for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
Shawn 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.
2:15
As Courtney noted, a NASA funded telescope,
the Atlas Survey Telescope in Chile, first reported observations of
2:21
the comet on July 1st, 2025 to the Minor Planet Center,
and NASA has been tracking and
2:27
studying comet three Atlas ever since.
We're here today to give you the latest of what we know
2:32
about comet three Atlas and what we still want to know.
But first, what is a comet?
It's a
2:37
small, natural, solid body
that is a combination of rocky and icy material
that evaporates as it gets warm, as it warms when
2:43
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 2:49
it's important that we talk about that.
This object is a comet.
It looks and behaves
like a comet and has
and all 2:55 evidence
points to it being a comet.
(Not even close to all.
Blatant lie right at the onset.)
He was appointed to his position
by the guy
that Trump appointed
to run NASA
Translation:
He says what he is told to say.
He is a yes man.
He'a about as high
on the totem pole of respect
as most
daddy's lil rich boys are.
Thats not a lot BTW.)
"But this one came from
outside the solar system,
which makes it fascinating, exciting,
3:01 and scientifically
very important."
(Thats gonna be a familiar refrain:
"this one came from
outside the solar system"
They are trying to frame this as a:
"Oh this came from over there
that's why it is so different."
They got the same laws of physics
on the other side of the universe
that we got right here in The Milky Way.
So they aint any different
on the other side
of our galaxy either.
Duh.)
This is only the third interstellar object like this that humanity has ever
3:08
found.
And a little bit more about the rumors.
I think it's I think it's very important.
And I'm actually very excited that a lot of the world was
3:14
speculating about the comet
while NASA was in a period
where we couldn't speak about it
due to the recent government shutdown"
(They could have if they
wanted to.
If they wanted you to know?
You would have known.
Thats a very flimsy excuse at best.)
3:21
shutdown. I what I, what I,
what I took away from that whole experience,
and watching that
as we were working during
3:27
the shutdown,
(Opps, Told ya:
"They could have if they
wanted to.
If they wanted you to know?
You would have known.
He just said they were working
during the shutdown.)
was just how interested and how excited
3:33
people were
about the possibility
of what this comet could be.
There was a lot of speculation
about what it could be,
(There still is.
Or he wouldn't have been here today
telling you about it.)
but what I what I think is
3:39
really awesome is that
folks are interested in this incredible finding
that we observed and that we have that
3:45
that came from the heavens"
(Joel 2:30-31
And I will shew wonders in the heavens
and in the earth,
blood, and fire,
and pillars of smoke.
31 The sun shall be turned into darkness,
and the moon into blood,
before the great and terrible
day of the Lord come.)
"And what that what that means,
what it could mean about
how magical the universe could be."
(Magic aint got nothing to do with it jack.
The universe is more mystifying
than he could ever imagine,
promise ya.)
"It 3:51 expanded people's brains to think about
what how magical the universe could be.
And I'll tell you, here at NASA, we
3:56
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 4:03
the shutdown constraints
about what that comet is,
(Dude just said:
"what I took away from
that whole experience,
and watching that
as we were working during
3:27
the shutdown,")
"because we think the universe is a magical place,
and we spend your treasure,"
(Our taxes?
WTF is he even talking about?)
4:08
"and we spend all of our time
trying to make sure
that we explore that
and share
4:14
it with you as much as we can.
(Thats a pretty telling statement
He just might as well have said:
"There are things we cant tell you.")
"In fact,
we want very much
to find signs of life in the
4:19 universe."
(Well ever last one of ya
can:
"want very much
to find signs of life in the
universe."
All you want to.
See how much good it does ya.
These people
are in the
Government financed
business
of trying to prove God wrong
And they keep getting their asses
handed to them
every time they turn around.
1 Corinthians 3:19
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.
For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.
Dont think so?
CBR Proves
a creation event took place.
UAP,
Exist outside the laws of nature.
strike two.
Three interstellar objects
1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov, and 3I/ATLAS
in the last eight years
each defying the laws of nature
in their own way.
Three strikes your out guys.
Yalls time is up.
You are on the defensive,
or you wouldnt have had a "live"
(hardly) event yesterday.)
"In fact, just a few months ago,
we were with you and we talked about
what we think might be the signal from
4:26
from ancient life on the surface of Mars,
(Yo political hack yes man wanna be,
apparently you didn't get the memo:
means absolutely nothing for life
Big Think 9/15/25 Ethan Siegel
This community doesn't
and wont
fall for your
stupid shit.
Ethan Seigel or Mr. Political hack?
Im gonna go with Ethan Seigel
100% of the time.)
from our amazing machines
that have been roving the planet for 30 years
4:31
to look for those things,
that that is something that's really important for us to,
to, to learn about and to discover.
It
4:38 could be an amazing discovery
if and when we can confirm that."
(The people that know
about these things
know what they found
on Mars recently
dont mean shit
and he just proved himself to be
nothing short of a
" political hack
yes man wanna be")
"But three Atlas is a comet. So
(The political one of the four wants you to believe:
1) There was ancient life on Mars.
2) They couldnt communicate with you
through the shutdown.
even though they were working
3) and that 3I/ATLAS is a comet.
Im gonna give a big fat
NOPE!
On all three of em.)
4:44
my colleagues from the Science Mission Directorate
will go through the images in detail. But just to give you a peek,
4:49
"here's one of the images
from the closest physical instrument we had
to the comet from the HiRISE instrument
on our 4:55
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter,
taken on October 2nd.
(We couldn't care less.
Where is the one from Oct 3rd
when it was at its closest
??????????
And you aint gotta tell me,
I already know,
You aint got it
and you cant get it.
Who else said:
Thursday, September 11, 2025
(Watch the camera malfunction lol.
Hopefully not.)
And:
Thursday, September 18, 2025
"A few minutes later yet another bot comes back and says largely the same things but this one says:
"Now if it were to HIT Mars
at exactly the right angel and deflect..."
Who else even gets remotely close
to having ever talked about
BOTH
those things?
As they are indeed related.
I knew right then as soon as they said that
that they were not going to release anything from
Oct 3rd from the
"the HiRISE instrument on our
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter"
Your going to get sick of hearing
about images from it on Oct 3rd
and the
"it came from another
part of the solar system" mantra.)
"As the comet sailed by at a distance of 19 million miles from the
5:01
instrument, you can see that comet three
Atlas looks like a fuzzy white ball.
"That ball
is a cloud of dust and ice
(They don't know its
composition,
they really dont.
Not definitively.
Theres just to much
of a cloud around it,
they cant see it
to see exactly
what it is made of.
Im going go with what
Elon Musk said
almost solid nickel.
Hey?
US treasury System Payment Code?
I think he would know
what 3I/ATLAS is made out of.)
"called the coma,
which is shed by the comet as it continues
its trajectory towards the sun.
(Okay it aint been headed for the sun for a while now already.)
5:14
I'll leave it to my esteemed
colleagues to share further details.
(And now trumps enforcer just sits
there and makes sure
nobody says anything they shouldn't.)
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 Ahmet 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."
(It aint different cause it's
"from over there"
It's different because
it violates the laws of physics.
And these people either know that
and are feeding you a line of B.S.
Or they just cant admit it to themselves.
and neither option is good.)
Three Atlas, as you heard, is the third known
5:56
interstellar object to pass through our solar system,
the first one being identified in 2017.
(8 years ago.
Three interstellar objects
Yall need a map?
WTF?
"Queue the Bishop:
"HELLO?
ANYBODY HOME?")
While these types of
6:03
interstellar objects have long been predicted,
we are just beginning to be able to find them thanks to the newest
6:10
technologies with our network of Earth based telescopes,
which are designed to find small, fast moving objects in
6:17 space.
The NASA funded Atlas Survey telescope,
which made the discovery is part of NASA's
6:23
Planetary Defense Network.
(That ought to tell you something
It really should.)
"Our telescopes
are always watching the skies
to keep us safe,"
(33 billion tons of nickel
23 km across
going 130,000 MPH,
with an erratic orbit
and the people that don't care if you eat
are gonna keep you safe from that
okay...
sure...yeah right...
Go with that then.
Good lord please people!)
and
6:28
in doing so, they occasionally make major,
scientifically interesting discoveries, just
6:34
like this one.
Right away, of course,
NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office
established they studied it
and they established the
3I/ATLAS is not a danger to Earth.
6:45
In fact, it's at least twice, twice as far away as the
distance between the Earth and our sun. "
(Wait till Mars comes back
on it's close pass by of earth
in Feb of 27
hello 360 day calendar again.
Me and honey did the math
from 701 bc
and the change in calenders
from 360 to 365 days
gives us right at
an extra 40 years.
One extra generation.
Times up.)
"On October 30th, the comet itself reached the
closest it will ever be to the sun
when it crossed just inside Mars's orbit.
Which is why the
image that 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
7:15
far away as our planet can possibly be from Mars.
It's been clear from the moment of
7:22
discovery that the comet was going to pass on the opposite side of the sun, from where the
7:27
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 spacecraft 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 I atlas almost the entire time it passes through our celestial neighborhood.
(But we cant get a picture from Oct 3rd?
When it was the closest to Mars?
From the same instrument that took
the images on Oct 2nd?
WHY?
Yawl just hung yourselves out to dry
several times now already.
And there aint no
government shutdown now yo.
Why cant we get a picture
from when it was
the closest to Mars?
We did the day before.
Pretty simple question.
And like I said,
I already know the answer.
I want it for others to see.
But we all know
it wont ever happen.)
"Everything NASA
7:57
science does is interconnected,
and nearly 20 mission teams
have been working together"
(But no picture from the HiRISE instrument on the
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from Oct 3rd?
20 mission teams and yall cant get that?
Really?
Yall were workin yo.)
8:04
to really rise to this challenge. 20 mission teams, by the way, and counting everything we're
8:10
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 three I 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 three I 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.
(All of that?
And no picture from
when it was the closest to Mars
on Oct 3rd?
Or from when
that hit it
a week beforehand?
"4:08
"and we spend all of our time
trying to make sure
that we explore that
and share 4:14
it with you as much as we can."
Well that phrase certainly
makes more sense now doesn't it?)
And I'll note that Parker Solar Probe's data were just downloaded yesterday. And indeed, we did
9:47
catch several glimpses of this amazing comet. The scientific community is hard at work
9:52
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 seven.
(Yeah...right...sure thing...gotcha
You know you got Trumps enforcer
sitting on stage with you
while you said that right?)
And
10:04
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.
10:11
We're still learning, even about what questions we still need to ask. And this, of course, is the scientific
10:16
process in action. All the data go to a public archive. We get
10:21
those images as soon as we're able to from all of our eyes in space. As always, I am excited
10:28
to see what new things we learn about
our friendly solar system visitor
(I think Im gonna vomit now.)
in the days and in fact,
10:34
the years to come.
So now I'm going to pass over to Sean.
He's going to tell you about
10:39
what our astrophysics missions have seen.
They, of course, were some of the first things to look at the comet and images
10:46
from from several of them have been available since the beginning of the summer.
So I'm going to ask you to set the
10:53
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,
10:59
Sean. >> Thanks, Nikki. Happy to. To give you some background, NASA's astrophysics missions. Like all our missions, they are
11:06
designed to do things that would otherwise be impossible in this case. And in this case, our nation's space telescopes
11:13
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 or near Earth objects or comets like three Atlas after they're initiallydetected.
11:25
That same powerful gaze that lets us these telescopes see distant galaxies, those little red dots you might
11:30
hear about. They also allow us to observe details
about objects like Three-i Atlas a
11:36
little bit sooner.
(They knew about it before July
that mysterious object shooting
Live science 07/03/25
"News of the extrasolar entity, initially dubbed A11pl3Z, broke on Tuesday (July 1), when NASA and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) both listed it as a confirmed object."
"On Wednesday (July 2), NASA released a statement confirming that A11pl3Z is indeed an interstellar object and will not remain in the solar system for long. The researchers also shared the object's new official name, 3I/ATLAS, and revealed that it is most likely a comet,
upending previous assumptions
that it was an asteroid.
And they knew it was erratic.
And that's why they "tagged" it so to speak
and that's why the armada of surveillance
instruments on it
almost its entire time
since it entered the solar system.)
And the earlier we learn about these objects, the earlier we can share this information with the
11:42
world, including the science community and our partners across the planet that often have ground based assets or
11:48
other space based assets so that they can conduct or conduct additional observations with their telescopes. In this
11:55
case, our astrophysics missions came together to take advantage of this rare opportunity to study
this comet that came to
12:02
us from outside the solar system,
(Its different cause its from over there
not because it violates the laws of physics
or anything.
Right, gotcha.)
from our flagship space telescopes to smaller missions like Tess and Swift. They all
12:07
have, as Nikki said, different complementary capabilities. They don't just do things that
12:13
would otherwise be impossible. They do things that even our other telescopes can't do. So every time we add to the fleet,
12:19
we add additional capabilities that expand the realm of the possible.
In this case, it led us refine the orbit of this
12:26
structure early on, determine
what its structure is
and what its composition is,
what it is made of.
(They dont know.
They cant see into the cloud
that surrounds it
to be able to determine
nucleolus size
or what it is made out of.)
It's a beautiful
12:32
illustration of why we have not just one space telescope,
but a fleet of them, because every one member of that fleet
12:39
specializes in a different kind of information,
contributing a different piece of the puzzle to the total understanding we
12:44
have from the fleet as a whole.
So, for example, old reliable. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
12:51
celebrated its 35th birthday earlier this year. Not too long after that, in July, it looked
12:58
at three Atlas. Not long after we discovered it from the ground. At this point, three Atlas was about 277 million
13:06
miles from Earth. And what Hubble's images revealed was a few things.
First, a teardrop shaped coma of dust coming off
13:12
that solid, icy nucleus
(They don't know that and I just told you why they dont.
This is the guy I thought I wouldn't like much
and it turns out I was right lol.
Nor the first guy either, Mr. political appointee.)
"of the comet itself.
From these data,
13:18
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,
(So which is it?
"now know"
or
"at that point"
(we knew).
He caught himself.
He knows what size it is now
and he was about to give it away
then he backtracked and said:
"At that point, actually"
Why? Because they now know
and its different from the Hubble image
they want everyone to keep referring back to.
The size of the nucleolus is important
as it will help with trajectory,
spin rates etc.
That as written yesterday.
Today Honey told me she has seen
two different Avi Videos
and said he was very upset
at not getting the size of the nucleus.
It's pretty important
and the camera that was to take the images on Oct 3rd
was supposed to really help with that.
So what about now?
How big is it now?
And why Hubble?
Why does everybody
keep referring back
to that image to guage size for?
Almost like they dont want
us to know how big it is.
WHY?
If it aint gonna hit us?
What difference does it make?)
"we knew it was between 1400 feet in diameter,
13:29
up to as large as three and a half miles in diameter.
And Hubble also saw that the comet
13:35
was losing dust and not just losing it, but
losing it at a rate consistent with other previous sun bound comets that
13:41
originated from within our solar system.
Consistent with the physics that we figured out from watching those objects.
13:46
(It hasn't lost nearly as much of its mass as it should have
particularly after coming around the sun
is pretty much how that goes.)
"Now, the last thing Hubble did
is that it gave us a better understanding
of the orbit of this object.
Tell us not just
13:53
where it was,
but where it was heading,
(More coming on that later)
so we could point other observatories at it,
such as the James Webb Space
13:58
Telescope. We added this to our fleet early in this decade.
We didn't have it when the last
14:04
two interstellar comets came around.
Now, when James Webb did,
and its companion Spherex,
which we only launched at the
14:09
beginning of this year, it added infrared observations,
the power of infrared observations is these are
14:15
colors we can't see.
They're redder than what our eyes can detect.
And infrared light is
14:20
particularly good at helping us understand the composition of objects.
We can see little molecular fingerprints from the
14:26
things that the objects are made of.
So with these infrared observations with James Webb and Spherex,
we detected an
14:32
abundance of carbon dioxide gas
in the comet's coma
and in the bright cloud of gas and dust
(Highest % of carbon dioxide ever observed
on a "comet")
14:37
surrounding that comet as it approaches the sun.
Those molecular fingerprints I mentioned, those are little the
14:43
little science wiggles you might see in the top right of these images.
We now know from seeing those science wiggles,
14:48
those fingerprints of those molecules,
that the comet has a nucleus
rich in carbon dioxide,
as well as the presence of
14:55
water ice.
Now the ratio, like,
we can not just say
that these things are there.
We can also
15:00
say, what's the ratio of carbon dioxide to water?
And and we now know that we know
it's larger than what we'd usually
see in solar system objects.
(It's the largest ever seen.
8 to 1.
Why cant he just tell you?)
But there's a lot of natural explanations for that. For one,
15:12
the carbon dioxide is going to kind of bake off that comet earlier on when it's far away.
But there's other
15:17
well-understood processes that could also explain it.
I'll just to put this in context.
There are every time we look
beyond our solar system and we look at the 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.
(The water vapor counts for less than 4 %.
This things carbon dioxide to water ratio
is the highest they have ever seen
and the fact that he didn't tell you that explicitly
tells you they don't like what they are seeing.)
"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 ices.
These ices could have been exposed to higher levels of radiation
than comets in our own system. Or as I said before,
could it be that the comet just formed from a region
where carbon dioxide ice was particularly abundant and
different from our solar system?
(Ref:
3I/ATLAS is Large and Releases Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
08/24/25)
"Other missions like our our Swift spacecraft, which studies
x rays and gamma rays, have also observed the comet
teams even look back through data from our test mission, which
16:06
was designed to look at exoplanets
and found observations of the comet
as early as May.
(Well I wonder why?
"upending previous assumptions
that it was an asteroid.")
And that information is helping us
16:12
understand the comet's history before it got closer,
and when those other observatories pointed at it, once we knew
16:17
where it was. Now that the comet is near our,
relatively speaking, our planetary and
16:22
heliophysics missions have joined in to tell us more.
And now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Tom Statler to
16:28
talk about some of those new images.
>> All right. Thanks very much,
16:34
Sean. Before we get started, I just want to remind everybody
16:40
of where we are, who is where in this, in this, in this play,
as you saw in the animations while Nikki was, was speaking,
16:47
the sun, of course, is at the center of our solar system.
The planets are orbiting around the
16:52
sun, and in this case, comet 3I Atlas
has come through on a trajectory in the opposite
16:58
direction and and has arrived at its closest point
to the sun when the Earth was on the wrong
17:05
side for us to conveniently observe.
But Mars was on the correct
side of the sun, and
17:10
our Mars assets
were able to observe the comet.
(Just not on Oct 3rd?
WTH?)
And also several of our other spacecraft
17:16
were on the correct side of the sun.
So the scientific community is really excited about the comet and about these
17:21
new observations. I'm tremendously excited to help share them with you today.
This is a new scientific opportunity,
17:27
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 by going directly
17:46
to what we were able to see at the beginning of of September,
when psyche was able to see the
17:56
mission. So before that, though, in August we organized a
18:02
workshop. We organized a coordination session for the missions across the NASA fleet
18:07
that had good opportunities for potentially observing three Atlas so that we could all share observing plans and knew
18:13
what was was going to be possible with our assets. I can't emphasize enough now how,
18:19
thanks to the cooperation of so many mission teams, we will be accumulating a wealth of data
18:24
on this comet that the science community will be digging into for years. Now, let's go back
18:31
to to September, and I can show you a sampling of the images
18:36
collected by our different mission teams. To set the context, you're going to see a comet that's a small body with
18:42
a coma around it, basically a fuzzy blob. Now, remember, space is big. Nothing is ever
18:48
really as close as you like.
And all of these observations are very, very difficult.
18:53
It's a little bit as if our NASA spacecraft were at a baseball game,
watching the game from different places in the stadium.
Everybody has 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
19:10
first images from the psyche spacecraft. NASA's psyche mission acquired for broadband
black and white images of the comet over the course of eight hours on September 8th and
ninth, 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 share Jupiter's orbit around the sun.
Called the Trojan asteroids, Lucy was 240 million miles away from Three-i Atlas, which is
circled in the center when its high resolution camera caught the comet, you can see the
comet's coma, the fuzzy halo of gas and dust surrounding three 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. 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 Lucy teams decided
21:11
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
21:32
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,
21:45
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.
(Cause they really don't know
that much at this point.)
It's a rare opportunity to compare ancient
21:56
dust from a distant solar system to that from our own.
Now let's go to the next
22:03
picture from the Maven spacecraft at Mars,
beginning at the beginning of October 3rd,
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.
(From Oct 2nd
Why not one from the 3rd
when it was the closest?)
Maven is another Mars orbiter that has been studying the Martian
22:25
atmosphere since 2014. Now, this picture is not a direct picture of the comet itself.
It's a spectrum. You're seeing the 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 it's coming from hydrogen gas in interplanetary
space. And on the left, that blob is the signature of hydrogen gas coming from comet
Three-i 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
Three-i 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
23:53
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,
(What about when it was active at 6 AU?
Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS
"Early data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), taken on May 7 to June 2, 2025 (accessible here), suggests that 3I/ATLAS may have been active with a surrounding glow of scattered sunlight already at a much larger heliocentric distance of 6 times the Earth-Sun separation. At that distance, the warming of water ice by sunlight is insufficient to trigger cometary activity.
And It shouldnt have been?
How many times do these people
have to deliberately overlook things
before you start to understand
what is going here?)
which provides
insight into the formation of the comet and its journey through our galaxy. Now, the
European Space Agency's agency and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or
Soho, also successfully imaged three Atlas from October 15th
to 16th, 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 three 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 and 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
24:58
the ability to see other objects crossing, in this case behind the sun.
From thetelescope's point of view,
you'll be able to see the rest of the images on our 3D Atlas
website.
Go NASA.gov. Atlas 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.
(Noted)
"And also it's a long way
25:24
from where we are today."
Seeing the initial images to
then making sure that they are
25:31
accurately calibrated and processed to do science with
and then doing the analysis, combining the data sets,
25:36
understanding them, and finally
producing the scientific understanding the knowledge of
25:42
what this all means,
which will be which will be published
in peer reviewed scientific journals.
"The answers will come later on."
(Some of us already have them.
Go ahead
Be mad about that statement.
And?)
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."
25:58
This is a snapshot of where we are very early in the scientific process.
Okay, back
26:04
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
26:11
event. Just a reminder to our media on the phone to press Star one
to enter the queue and ask your questions.
We'll take
26:17
our first question from the phone bridge from Marcia Dunn with the Associated Press.
26:23
>> Yes. Hi. Based on your latest observations,
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 or origin,
all that sort of thing?
26:40
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.
(Oh you mean back earlier
when he caught himself
and backtracked?
13:18
"Importantly, the size of the nucleus.
We now know
it's between.
At that point,
actually")
"So we're still right now in that range of
27:00
somewhere in the vicinity of couple of thousand feet to a
27:05
couple of miles diameter.
But we'll get better on that one.
(Thats what the perseverance Rovers HiRISE camera
was supposed to help with and apparently it didnt:
"we'll get better on that one"
How?
You arent going to get an instrument
any closer than what that one already was.)
And why still the Hubble image
when there are more advanced instruments
JWST
that could have been used?)
"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."
(Shape, size, rotation, composition
They aren't sure about any of that.)
"But what observers from the ground have been able to do is observe
27:29
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.
(It rotates every 16.16 hours
is what Avi goes with
to this guy its:
"it's very difficult to discern."
Other "comets" have this issue?
Which ones and why?
Why is this hard to figure out again?
"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.)
27:40
So what it's looking like so far is that
there's there's not a big the shape of the nucleus
is not very far from being round.
It's not doesn't seem to be a big or at least we're not
seeing signatures of a very elongated object yet.
There's lots still to come there. I think you're also talking about
origin. It's it would be great. It would be fabulous if we could trace back the, the 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 is, Sean knows, is a big and
complicated place, and the sun and all the other stars in our galaxy are in orbit around around the center of the galaxy.
And so three Atlas has been in interstellar space
for a very long time.
"There is
circumstantial evidence, given how fast it has come in to to our solar system, that it came
from some very old population, some 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
28:58
means the Three-i 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
29:14
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 mentioned 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 would 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 would fit an explanation like that? Or as far as you're
concerned, does 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've just got to point, you know it's natural to wonder what it is. And we weactually love, as Ahmed said, we love that the world wondered along with us. And that's such a cool thing. We certainly were able because of the the measurements that Sean
30:42
described from the astrophysics telescopes
that immediately turned on
on this object once we found it.
( It was erratic
thats why they did that
AND
When was it
that it was found exactly?
"On Wednesday (July 2), NASA released a statement confirming that... it is most likely a comet, upending previous assumptions that it was an asteroid."
And even, you know, I was interested,
I just learned that we'd actually gone back
and and actually seen it
30:54
before we even found it.
(Click bait "science" websites
were posting stuff about that back in September
how do these people at NASA not know that?)
So that was super cool.
I just heard that from Sean.
(SMH)
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, tick them off and say, yep, it really does behave like a comet.
(It's in a class by itself
and every last one of these people on stage
all know it.
If I know it?
How can they not?)
The interesting thing that, you know, Tom, I know if I give him,
if I throw him, 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."
(Thats the mantra:
"Its from over there
Thats why it's different."
The laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe.
This object defies them in multiple ways.)
And that's why we're so excited about it. It's only the third
31:34
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 technosignature or anything from it
that would lead us to believe it was anything other than a comet.
(Way to quick, it kinda gave it away
it wasnt a comet
particularly coupled with the fact that
somehow some people
had "previous assumptions"
that it was an asteroid.)
"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."
(Some of those differences defy the laws of physics)
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 it didn't come from our solar system.
(It doesnt just look different
it acts different.
Sublimating at 6 AU
Changing colors etc.
Anti-tail.)
"And that's what makes it so magical."
(Supernatural.)
You want to geek out a little bit,
Tom? [LAUGHTER] >> You were geeking out so expertly, Nikki, to begin with.
32:36
Embracing that. That was fabulous. But that's exactly right. I mean, objects from
32:42
"things from other places,
we naturally expect them
to be different from our own"
(Nothing goes forward
Let alone "dust particles"
going 58,000 kilometers out
into a 130,000 mph headwind.)
32:47
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."
(Its still coffee!
Calling an erratic 33 billion ton asteroid
a comet don't make it one
Just because you said so!)
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
33:42
same thing comets do, comets do.
It evaporates carbon dioxide gas,
it evaporates water.
(Less than 4%
How many times these people told you that.
It's important.
If it has a "solid icy core"
why is the water vapor coming off of it only 4%?
Lowest ever.
Weird co2 to water ratios
Nickle to Iron ratios etc.
These people are obviously
not telling you
the entire story.
The question is:
WHY
??????????)
But
33:48
there's it's evaporating more carbon dioxide
compared to water. So that's a very interesting thing.
(Way more.
Unhear of levels)
Comets
33:55 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.
(Theres is barely a trace of Iron.
Nickle without Iron doesn't occur in nature
It exist outside the known laws of nature.
ITS SUPERNATURAL)
Detection of an Anti-Solar Tail for 3I/ATLAS
08/30/25 Medium Avi Loeb.
"Recent spectroscopic data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile (accessible here), reported the surprising detection of cyanide and nickel without iron in the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS with steeply increasing rates as the object approaches the Sun. Nickel without iron is a signature of industrial production of nickel alloys. Natural comets generically show iron and nickel simultaneously, as both elements are produced simultaneously in supernova explosions.")
"That's really interesting."
Really remarkable. And something to be studied in the future.
So we're we're always
34:19
interested in new ideas. We're always interested in new suggestions.
And and all ideas are good when they're born. But
those that stand the test of time,
those that 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
34:38
Matthew Glasser with ABC. >> Good afternoon. Thank you for doing this. Tom mentioned
34:45
that the answers will come in time. I'm curious about what are some of the hopes that we might discover from this comet? What might it tell us about our planet, about our solar system, about 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.
(You might wanna start
teaching some people
Codes dont invent themselves
(genetic, DNA, etc)
It's not rocket science.
Get it?
It's not rocket science.
I crack myself up lol.)
And we get little bits, little clues to parts of that puzzle,
35:32
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 planets 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
36:20
solar System, show us clues to how the orbits of the major planets may have changed over
36:25
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.
(Ctrl F and search the above link for it
cause it just destroys the nebula hypothesis
among other things, angular momentum etc)
Now, interstellar objects, like I said before, are new windows,
and it's windows that we've never even looked 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, the, the breadth, the wide
spectrum of conditions that existed
in different parts of the galaxy,
(That doesn't explain it
violating the laws of nature
It doesn't matter
who says it
or how many times they do.)
"in different solar systems,
where the compositions
may the elemental abundances,
the mineral abundances may have been very, very different.
(Natural laws are the same there to.
How many times did they tell you that?)
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 everyplace 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 there 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 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
37:49
those origins of our own solar system and
how volatiles were delivered to make life possible
here on Earth.
(The much more interesting question I think is:
"How did information get into life?"
As it couldn't have created itself.
Information always comes from am outside source.
Always.
Has too.)
"Combined with that big picture of other systems of the dust spread
throughout those other solar systems."
(If cosmic dust brought life here?
and we got like 50 tons of space dust daily.
And no new lifeforms?
WHY?
Just explain that one to me.
Good luck.)
And now with this visitor that got frozen in time
38:05
from somewhere beyond our solar system,
(Good lord how many times
do they have to say it?)
and that small picture of what that was like when that formed. >> And the fact that, I mean, I love the the sort of thought of it as that frozen fossil, almost frozen time capsule, we're kind of privileged. I 38:18mean, 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 was outgassing at 6AU.
It's to cold at that distance.
Its not warming up anymore,
its past its closest distance to the sun.)
It isn't just
38:30
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, it makes me feel almost privileged to actually be able to unlock the secrets as as this commentary commentary object is coming around and rendezvousing and interacting with our solarsystem. >>
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 NASA.gov
And take a look at the trajectory.
I kind of talked through it briefly.
Tom talked through it.
And you can sort of see where those planets are.
And 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.
(Has she seen
all the craters on the moon lately?
WTF?)
"But certainly the objects
in our solar system will be just fine."
39:55
>> And we have another question from social media from Astro.
No, ma'am.
They ask, what makes
comet three I Atlas so different and intriguing
compared to the other interstellar comets?
40:06
>> Tom, you. >> Want to take on. >>
The other, other, other interstellar objects. We say
40:11
interstellar objects because not all of them were comets.
So the first one was discovered in
40:17
2017. That was one eye
Oumuamua that behaved very much like an asteroid.
("upending previous assumptions that it was an asteroid.")
Again, a little bit
like three 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 was seemed to be very, very elongated.
And 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
40:50
enough for for us to get really, really comprehensive, long duration observations and
40:55
understand exactly what it was doing. It was the very first one. We saw it for a short time
41:00
when it was on its way out, in fact, and so we didn't get a great view of that.
The second object to I, Borisov discovered in 2019, 2019 behaved. It was
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 Three-i 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
41:36
bit at the edge of what we're used to seeing.
Three I Atlas is, in a lot of ways like two
eye Borisov, but a bit more out there in terms of things like the the carbon dioxide to water ratio.
(8 to 1,
since they aren't gonna tell you.)
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.
(Except the Oct 3rd image?)
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
citizen science programs, we love that too.
We love everybody to be sharing in the
joy of NASA science as we we take every opportunity to to
take advantage of these incredible visitors to our solar system.
And that citizen science campaign that includes work
42:38
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. Also a Soho big, big comet. Find a
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 43:06
next question comes from Ken Chang with the New York Times. >> Hi. Thank you. This is for
43:12
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.
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 some of the differences
43:38
I already mentioned is
the the ratio of the carbon dioxide to water ratio,
the nickel to iron ratio.
(Like 0 Iron.
Doesn't occur in nature.
Nickle without Iron that is.)
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.
(Like what exactly?)
"There are other indications
that that the physical properties of,
of this dust may be the the grain size
distribution might be different from
the sort of sorts of things that we're 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 on the sunward side.
(Going 130,000 MPH?
These people just assume you are stupid.
Nothing goes forward
off of anything
headed into a 130,000 MPH wind.
Not 58,000 km out it doesn't.
NOTHING.
Unless it violates the laws of physics, ie
"Supernatural.")
"And then it took a while for the solar radiation pressure
to push it back the other way. That's been seen
before in other comets."
Not like this it hasn't.
Not from something this big
going this fast and go ahead and
add in all the other anomalies
and all they were doing yesterday
was trying to excuse things away
cause they know they got issues
with this object.
"these angular extents correspond to
spatial sizes of 0.95 million kilometers
for the sunward anti-tail"
(More than 58,000 km nowdays
We haven't ever seen that before.)
The Remarkable Large-Scale Structure
of Anti-Tail and Tail Jets from 3I/ATLAS
Avi Loeb Medium 11/09/25
Plus the anti-tail was there.
Then it transitioned into a regular tail.
Then it disappeared
Then it came back again.
This is not what has been observed:
)"But but not not very often. "
(Ever.)
And I'm
44:31
sorry, Ken, what was the second part of the question? >> The explosion. >> Did it.
>> Perihelion. >> Yeah. Yeah. The jets. Right. So seeing activity, seeing 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 takes time for the actual event that happens on the surface to propagate out to a distance where you can see it
45:06
with the 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, 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 £0.67. 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
45:56
off, this comet in these jets is at those warmer temperatures, additional things can bake off,
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.
(It's already past as warm as it was ever going to get
when it was the closest to the sun.)
And looking at the details of what other molecules we detect
46:13
beyond the carbon dioxide and water we mentioned is also going to be interesting,
(Water ice is less than 4%.
They are trying to make it seem like its normal
when it just isnt.)
especially for that sort of like, what was this? What was
46:19
the area in the what was this stuff made of in the area? It was made like long, long, long
46:25
time ago. >> Right. >>
"Our next question is from
David Chandler with Sky and telescope.
46:31
>> Yes. A couple of things. Have you any of these
46:39
observations showing you anything
about any non-gravitational accelerations
at this point? And also, can you say a little bit about coming attractions? What what
observations are in the pipeline that have been made but not released yet?
I think the MRO, HiRISE observations
that has that been released yet
and what else is there that's either in hand 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
47:15
accelerations. This is something that we look very closely at for every comment,
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 it in the other direction. 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
47:56
determination team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
earlier this week.
And what they said
48:01
is that this is being monitored, 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.
48:14
"It's difficult to get a very,
very precise track
on exactly where it's going."
(No kiddin'
Never knew.
Why were there no images
from Oct 3rd from the HiRISE instrument
on the mars reconnaissance rover again?
Lil past the 39 minute mark:
"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
48:20
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. You know, 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 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
48:48
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 three Atlas.
(It's already past the sun
it isnt heating up any more.)
Those are
48:58
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 HiRISE image that you asked about
49:10
specifically, it kind of rolled that out at the beginning.
So please, please take a look at
49:16
that image.
(Why can they get an image from the 2nd
of October
but not the third
??????????
Why is nobody asking this question?
Not even Avi?
And I know he already knows.)
I think, you know, Sean is not bragging a lot on what these astrophysics telescope. I don't know why, 49:22 but 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 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 tracking it to 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'd 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, justreally making sure we're sharpening up those images and, and really, you know, making sure they're calibrated. Right
50:24
now we're putting out almost the raw images. We're putting out things quickly so everyone can see them.
(What happened to the ones from Oct 3rd?)
But we'll take
50:29
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, taking take out that hydrogen, take out the hydrogen from our solar system, and then let us look at thhydrogen that's coming from the comet. So 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? >> Want to take that?
>> The the the images that were released received the the sort of standard processing that we
do between the raw data that comes down into a telescope that, as Nikki said, we need to
make sure for scientific accuracy that they're calibrated against the other observations, and we account
for anything the telescope is doing in that moment. And so there's
it would be our
standard set of calibrations and normalizations for a object of this type,
which is to say a
51:35
comet. >> I can add a little bit more to that. The as Nikki said,
our desire was to get these images
out to the public as quickly as possible.
(Oct 3rd?
It's Nov 20th.
You worked during the shutdown.
Shut up already.)
And so there are some image artifacts in there that
51:46
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. The 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. It was 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. The sunlight reflected off parts of the spacecraft got into the camera, and that resulted in those little blobs. So that' 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
53:04
asks,
how can an object
like Three I Atlas
come from so far?
Moving as fast as it is
and not hit anything?
(Older than our solar system?
It's hit plenty of stuff in its lifetime.)
"Orbital dynamics
and space is really, really huge.
And so,
53:16
you know,
it's it is amazing to think about just how big the
even our solar system.
And so to to give you the Voyager spacecraft,
Voyager o
ne is now
one light day away from Earth,
which means when we send a command or we send a, you know,
a photon from Earth, it takes a full day for that photon to arrive at Voyager.
And Voyager
53:41
is only just outside,
kind of what we think of
as the edge of our solar system.
find me another one.
Genesis 1:6-8
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,
and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7 And God made the firmament,
and divided the waters which were under the firmament
from the waters which were above the firmament:
The firmament is space.
The waters under it
are the waters here.
The waters above froze
and expanded with space
=
Oort cloud.
Icy home of comets.
Don't think so?
Find another one then.
Kizzillions of solar systems right?
Surely another one has one.)
and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven.
And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And so space
53:48
is vast. Yes, yes, this thing is moving quickly.
And yes, it came from outside our solar
53:53
system, but it really is.
The probability of it actually hitting something
is so small
because everything has to align.
(I guess the moon shouldn't have
all of those craters then right?)
It's also not quite in the ecliptic plane.
It's not quite
54:04
in like the our normal."
(From earlier:
"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.
48:14
"It's difficult to get a very,
very precise track
on exactly where it's going.")
If you think about sort of looking
side on at our solar system
54:10
with the sun,
and then you put the planets kind of
in a row normally everything sort of
54:15
orbits in, in this plane.
This is slightly tilted tipped,
(5 degrees one of Avis 12 anomalies.)
not unusual because
it's not gravitationally bound to our
54:21
sun, but it's slightly tipped.
"That makes the probability of hitting it
almost even even greater."
I always wondered why Avi
made such a big deal about it being
within 5 degrees of the ecliptic
other than it was just odd:
"That makes the probability of hitting it
almost even even greater."
Now we know.)
54:26
>> If I can play with a scale model solar if you want.
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 pea 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.
(Things still collide.
Just look at the moon.
Duh.)
54:54
>> Okay, we'll head back to our phone bridge.
Our next question is from Brandon Spector with
55:01
Live Science
Hi. I wanted to ask about the age of the comet. 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
55:24
talk about ages in the galaxy. Okay, so so cutting to the end.
The bottom line is going to be
55:31
it's probably going to be really hard
to get a more precise figure from one object.
I think what we're looking at
55:37
in the future,
as we discover more of these,
when we get to the point where we have maybe a
55:42
few dozen of them and look at the distribution of properties,
we may be able to get a better
55:48
handle on on what the distribution of ages is.
So what's going on here is that
it takes the sun 240 million years
55:56
to orbit around the center of the galaxy.
(Multiple of 6 or 60 interesting.
And AI transcription had that at 250 million,
I had to go back and double check what he said.
Draw your own conclusions.)
And we're doing that with a neighborhood of, of stars. So we're all going
56:02
around the center of the galaxy. The relative motions between stars in our solar neighborhood
is sort of ten ish. 15 and sorry, I have all these numbers in my head in metric because
that's the way I learn them.
But 10 or 15 ish kilometers per second.
So what is that?
That's about 25,000 miles an hour, I think.
And and Three-i 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
neighborhood, which is telling us that it's coming
from a different population from what
what we have generally around us.
Now, Sean will be able to clarify the age dispersion
56:45
relation in our galaxy,
which tells us which has been discovered over the last
century studying stars in the galaxy, that
the the relative speeds of stars is 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
57:08
circumstantial evidence that makes us think that that three I 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
57:28
Webb Space Telescope in particular.
This 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.
In other words,
57:40
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
57:46
hundreds of millions of years.
Then the the the amount of time there was between the origin of
57:51
the universe and the earliest galaxies the JWST has now observed.
And that's part of this story of how well we
57:56
understand not just the history of our home planet,
but the history of the entire universe that it's a part of. And now
58:01
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
58:09
for today comes from X and asks
if we can see grains of sand on Mars. How is the clearest photo
58:15
we can see? >> Oh. >> For three I atlas what we've seen.
58:20
>> So because we're closer to the grains of sand 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 the Atlas is 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
58:42
talking about, they they can't even see these galaxies,
but because their Atlas
was closer to them than they were to JWST
58:49
they got really good images
of those of the object as it passed by.
(Okay so maybe that's why they keep deferring to the Hubble image
to gauge 3I/ATLAS size, but why not just come out and say it?
As opposed to making people wonder why not more images from the JWST
instead of the older instrument Hubble?)
>> Right. As you said, we can
58:54
we can image individual grains on Mars because
we have spacecraft standing on Mars.
But even our closest spacecraft
59:01
to three Atlas were still 19 million miles away. >>
And it's going too fast for us to send something there to
59:07
intercept and get that close to it.
So that's just not that we just don't have the if we if we
could, we would like we'd 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
59:26
observe Three Eye Atlas. Find new images,
detailed information, and resources by visiting nasa.gov. And by
following NASA Solar System on Social media. Thanks for joining.
Pictures of the CME?
hitting 3I/ATLAS?
It happened a week before
the government shutdown.
All those instruments looking at this thing
since it came into the solar system
and no images of that?
Or from Oct 3rd?
when it was the closest to Mars?
They did absolutely nothing
to answer for Avi's 12 anomalies.
Absolutely nothing.
A rich man dont
need to prove it to you.
He already knows it.
So why did they open up
with Trump enforcer dude
focusing on rumors' about 3I/ATLAS
and stating emphatically:
"IT IS A COMET!"
Well then why are you still
trying to convince us that it's a comet
four months down the road then?
And who thought
it was an asteroid before
July 2nd:
"upending previous assumptions
that it was an asteroid"
Hum...
If you really knew what was up.
You would have been in church
seven years ago.
Godspeed.
Journey well friends.
No comments:
Post a Comment